Restricting permissions to individual documents on SharePoint

Question

Here's what I'm trying to do:

I would like to create a list of documents on a site in my company's SharePoint site. Each document should have specific user's permissions to view and edit it.

For example: The list is for performance reports. John has his out there called "John_PR_09.docx". Only him and his supervisor should have permissions to view, edit, or do anything to it. And then another employee has hers out there with permissions for only her and her supervisor, and so on...

I have tested this out with a document that I removed the groups and users from (since they inherit permissions from it's parent) and only gave my user account permissions to. I then asked someone else to try and open and she could, she even wrote "TEST" on the document and saved it.

What am I doing wrong? I thought I stopped it from inheriting permissions from it's parent and only gave myself rights to edit it.

Answer 1

Unfortunately, there is no way to implement per-item permissions with an out-of-the-box SharePoint document library.

One potential solution, if your organization is running SharePoint Server 2010 and has My Sites set up, is to set up each user with a document library in their My Site that you (or the person uploading the documents), the supervisor, and of course, the person who "owns" the My Site, have proper permissions to.

Answer 2

You can do this in TFS 2010 project portals (which is Sharepoint, don't know how custom), by selecting a document, clicking 'Document Permissions' in the ribbon and then selecting 'Stop Inheriting Permissions'. It will warn you that changes to the document library permissions will no longer affect that document, if that's fine then click OK and start managing permissions.

The user will be able to view the Library page, but the only documents listed for them will be the ones to which they have access. They will also be listed in the Library's permissions as having 'Limited Access' (except on those documents where they have specific access levels set).

Answer 3

I just give it a try and this is what I've done:

On the document (Word 2007 document):

Manage Permissions - Actions - Edit Permissions - New - Add User - Then I added a specified user that is not in any administrative groups on sharepoint and he was able to open the document

I removed this user and he is not able to open the file. Access Denied.