Managing Sharepoint Permissions At Scale For Large Teams

The Challenge of Scaling Permissions

As teams grow to hundreds or thousands of members, managing SharePoint permissions becomes increasingly complex. The decentralized permission model that works fine for smaller teams can quickly become unscalable. Common challenges include:

• Too many individual permissions leading to administrative overload
• Inconsistent or outdated access rights as members join and leave the team
• Confusion surrounding which groups or roles have access to which sites and content
• Locks and inheritance issues that block permission changes
• Lack of visibility into who has access to what content

For example, Company X, with over 1,000 employees spread globally across multiple sites, found that site owners had granted folder access permissions directly to individuals over time. With no consistent group permissions strategy, they ended up with over 50,000 discrete permissions. This resulted in administrators constantly getting tagged whenever someone needed access, often leading to duplicate permissions.

Best Practices for Permission Management

The key to effectively scaling SharePoint permission management is implementing organizational structures that reflect how team members collaborate. Best practices include:

• Audit existing permissions and develop access tiers aligned to business roles and working groups
• Classify sites and content by sensitivity levels for access control consistency
• Leverage groups with cascading permissions inheritance rather than individual user rights
• Automate permission management using PowerShell scripts whenever possible
• Build reports on user vs group permissions for ongoing access reviews

For example, Company X created four permission levels based on the corporate hierarchy. This included site collection administrator, department lead, department user, and guest. Using this aligned structure with cascading inheritance drastically simplified managing permissions for 1,000+ users while still maintaining access security.

Permission Management with PowerShell

Automating permissions with PowerShell is key for managing permissions at scale. PowerShell enables batch permission updates across numerous sites and subsites consistently in minutes versus hours or days manually. Below are some of the most important commands for automation:

• Get-SPWeb – Returns permission objects to view current state
• Set-SPUser – Add or update user permission level
• Set-SPGroup – Update permission level for SharePoint group
• Add-SPUser – Grant user access to a site collection
• Remove-SPUser – Revoke user access

For example, the following script enumerates permissions on the ‘Marketing’ site and adds the ‘Summer Interns’ group with read permissions:

$web = Get-SPWeb "https://intranet.portal/sites/Marketing"
$group = $web.SiteGroups["Summer Interns"]
Set-SPGroup -Identity $group -PermissionLevelsToAssign "reader"

By integrating these PowerShell permission management scripts into Azure Logic Apps and automated workflows, permissions can stay in sync even in dynamic team environments.

Troubleshooting Common Permission Issues

Occasionally issues can arise even with the most organized permission structures requiring troubleshooting steps like:

• Inheritance errors – Use Remove-SPUser with -IgnoreInheritanceStatus to force clearance of blocked access.
• Policy restrictions – Create exception cases for service accounts or groups needing elevated rights.
• Audit log failures – Check ULS logs to identify source issues stopping logging such as storage limits.
• Permission enumeration timeouts – Use indexed properties only with Get-SPWeb to restrict results for large databases.

As an example, Company X ran into issues where business managers wanted certain groups like “Product Analysts” to have edit rights for certain libraries with converted folders. By default, permissions would fail to apply inherited business managers due to nested inheritance rules. By force removing the unique permissions first, then re-adding the node-level access policies, they resolved these permission blockers.

Sustainable Models for Managing Permissions

The optimal permission management model evolves along with the organization. Centralizing too early creates bottlenecks while decentralizing too much allows permissions sprawl. Generally, a federated model works best long-term for large teams by following two rules:

1. Site collection admins govern permissions for department sites they own directly.
2. A Central IT group regularly audits and provides guard rails and automation.

With this model site owners can respond quickly to access requests from their business unit directly without ticket overhead while IT maintains consistency and compliance via automation. Regular access reviews comparing site membership against HR systems and permission management training for site owners is also critical for preventing sprawl over long time periods.