One of the good things about Microsoft SharePoint 2007 is that it provides Document-Level security - that is the ability to set the set specific access permissions for an individual document within a document library. This allows sensitive documents to be stored alongside other related documents but only be editable or even visible to a restricted set of users.
The problem is that with out-of-the-box SharePoint 2007, only those users with Design or Administrator rights are able to set document level security. In a typical SharePoint deployment most end-users are assigned Contributor permissions to document libraries, which means that they do not see the menu option to Manage Permissions when they right click on an individual file in a document library.
Microsoft Gold Partner MacroView have developed a SharePoint 2007 add-on that addresses this problem. Their Enhanced Document Level Security module allows Contributor-level users to configure access permissions of an individual document so that the only users that can see or edit the document are the current user and optionally another user who has been nominated as the Author for the document. This meets a very common need, which is for an administrative support person to save a sensitive document on behalf of a senior staff member (e.g. a paralegal on behalf of a lawyer).
MacroView normally licences their Enhanced Document Level Security module as part of their WISDOM Document Management Framework. WISDOM DMF is designed to enable fully functional, easy to use document management solutions based on Microsoft SharePoint 2007. Other nice features of WISDOM DMF include an intuitive tree-view of the user’s available SharePoint environment, consistent handling of meta-data in SharePoint and excellent support for saving emails and their attachments to SharePoint.
The Enhanced Document Level security module is also available separately. It installs as a SharePoint Feature, which can be stapled to any document library. Once this is done, Contributor-level users can set security for individual documents simply by selecting ‘Yes’ for a ‘Secure Document’ column when saving or editing the document. WISDOM then does the rest.
Tags: Document Management, MOSS, Security, SharePoint
