Understand groups and permissions on a SharePoint site

As a member of the Owners group you determine the level of access to your site. You can grant users access to the whole site, or to specific information on the site, such as a list or even a single file. Assigning permission levels to a specific item can help you to protect sensitive content, such as a contract or budget information, without restricting access to the rest of the site.

SharePoint groups and permission levels help you to efficiently manage access to sites. You add users to SharePoint groups and assign permission levels to your site and to its contents. By default, permissions on lists, libraries, folders within lists and libraries, items, and documents are inherited from their parent site. However, you can assign unique permissions to items at a lower level, such as subsites, libraries, or even files.

Each site comes with a default set of SharePoint groups, such as Owners. The name of the SharePoint group matches the name of the site. For example, if the name of the site is Marketing, a group will be called Marketing Owners. You can add people to these groups, so that you can later grant access to the group instead of having to grant access to each individual user. You can also create SharePoint groups to provide custom levels of access. You might want to provide more liberal or restrictive access to a specific group than you would to the default members of your site. For example, if you have a group of marketing managers that often gives confidential presentations, you might want to create a Marketing Managers group that can share information that is restricted from all other users of the site.

Each permission level has a set of permissions associated with it, based on the intended roles and tasks for that level. For example, the Members group has the Contribute permission level by default. As a site owner, you choose which permissions are associated with each permission level (except for Limited Access and Full Control, which cannot be customized) or add new permission levels to combine different sets of permissions. Some sites have additional groups and permission levels that are tailored to the purpose of the site, such as publishing or records management sites.