Friday, March 23, 2007

Keeping users from seeing documents other than their own in a Document Library

You are sitting here reading this for one of two reasons:

  1. You are trying to figure out why in the world you would want to do this, isn't the point of SharePoint to Share information and documents?
  2. You have come across this and a fix would be oh so sweet…

Well, if you are still wondering why one would want to do this let me give you a scenario: Expense Reports within a Form library (a form library is simply a document library to hold InfoPath forms). You currently have a form library where users go to fill out there expense reports and it has a beautiful workflow built in to go through the approval process. The problem is you would prefer users don't see everyone else's expense reports because they might just see someone else is spending more, getting a nicer hotel, etc etc. How do you stop this? In a list you can modify the settings to allow users to only see/edit their own, but in a document library you do not have this option. Well what if you turn on approvals and never approve any of the documents? When you have approval turned on in a document library a user can only see their own until the others are approved. I know not a perfect fix, but it gets you want you want. I have some other fixes for forms libraries in particular, but I will save them for another blogging dayJ


 

 

4 comments:

Ghost Writer said...

Welcome to the blogosphere. Blogger is debatable as a blogging platform, but welcome! You need to submit your blog to be indexed.

Ghost Writer said...

hi from joel.

Unknown said...

Hey Nicola,,,

I have been scouring the web looking for an answer to this and hoped this was it... Unfortunately, it is not the answer....Other users can still see unapproved documents.

Have you any other thoughts for this please?

Daniel Root said...

I have this exact issue, and am surprised this isn't a more common request. It seems like with _most_ forms, you would want a person to be able to submit a form, but only see their forms in the list. I'm interested in hearing your suggestions!

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