Help, SharePoint security is unmanageable!

One annoying thing about SharePoint, is security. Now don’t get me wrong there isn’t a problem with how secure SharePoint actually is, but with managing security.

Let’s say you have 10 sites and a user of a company who has been given, over a period of time, access to each site as a Contributor. His hard work at the company pays off and the user is promoted. How do you elevate the user’s Permission Level to Site Owner? That’s easy I hear you say, go to each site and set the permissions. But if you get a lot of these requests and you have a large number of users in a large number of sites it is going to become a big overhead.

Like with other parts of SharePoint there are tools and add-ons that can help.

One tool I have used is called Universal SharePoint Manager 2007 by iDevFactory (http://www.idevfactory.com/). Its current feature list includes:

• Environment (Farm) Reporting
• User Site Security Analyzer
• User List/Item Security Analyzer
• Permission Level Site Access
• Add User Site Security
• Remove User Site Security
• Clone User Site Security
• Account Property Synchronizer
• Dead Account Cleaner
• Site Level Reporting
• Sites Manager
• Site Security Auditor
• Site Collection Administrators
• Site Security Reset
• Site Permission Replicator
• List and Item Security Auditor
• List Security Reset
• List Permission Replicator
• Item Security Reset
• Item Permission Replicator

And the list grows. The tool is primarily a security tool but it’s features are growing fast. Well worth a look I say.