Like the Microsoft 365 platform in general, SharePoint Online offers a wide range of options for providing access to documents. In SharePoint Online, you can use user groups, security groups, private user groups, and isolated users. You can create a user group, for example, in Active Directory (AD), and use AD to grant access permissions to the information stored on SharePoint. If AD does not have security groups, then SharePoint has its model of security groups. By default, three security groups generate when a site is created:
- Owners, whose members have the broadest rights on this site.
- Members who are allowed to edit but not share with other members.
- Visitors who are only allowed to view and read.
If you need to mix rights or grant personal rights to a user, you can not create groups but use permission levels and grant them directly. There are six such access levels, and the seventh is a mixture of rights.
The next element is Scope, the Scope in which to grant permission. You can do this at the site level, at the list or library level, or the level of each list item. In SharePoint, you can grant the right to an individual user for a specific document within the system.
If the user is granted site-level rights, these permissions will be propagated to all child elements by default. This is “permission inheritance” and can break at different levels. The system allows you to build a flexible and secure model for managing permissions, complex but transparent from managing and verifying user access rights.
The main components of the collaboration and document management information model are site collection, subsites, document libraries, and lists. The site collection includes the top-level site and subsites. The top-level site starts work and grants rights to all other items. Next, subsites are created, on them sub-sites of the next level, etc.
At the site level, data storage is organized: lists, document libraries, and web pages are created. The library’s primary purpose is the storage of documents and files, and lists are the storage of information, which is presented in records. The web page is a regular Html page. It allows you to visualize what has been created in document libraries and lists, or display other content. You can add, edit, delete folders and files, share access for co-authoring, and download documents in a document library.
The system allows you to track user actions, store the history of file changes and maintain major and minor versions (when you need to work on a document, a minor version is created, and when the document is ready for publication, the major version is published). SharePoint also provides the ability to recover data within 93 days.
You can set up automatic notifications about changes, file uploads or deletions, or other edits in a document library. You can create custom views of your document library.
Lists provide a tabular presentation and sharing between team members and other site users. Lists provide extensive formatting, visualization, and categorization of items. With SharePoint lists and libraries, you can create a backend system that will store all the files, records, and information you need to build business applications.
To expand the possibilities of visualization or information input for storing reference documents, you can use programming elements and create your business systems, for example, EDMS. Microsoft Power Automate technology enhances the functionality for end-users to visualize information, enter data quickly, and access it from any device.
