Overview: Site governance, permission, and sharing for site owners
Applies ToSharePoint Server Subscription Edition SharePoint Server 2019 SharePoint Server 2016 SharePoint Server 2013 Enterprise SharePoint in Microsoft 365 SharePoint Foundation 2013 SharePoint in Microsoft 365 Small Business SharePoint operated by 21Vianet

Use this article as an overview of ideas and best practices for your site's governance model. If you are a site owner, create a governance model to address your site's policies, processes, roles, and responsibilities. A model like this will help you manage how people use your site. For example, you might want to require check-out of files so that multiple people don't try to edit a file at the same time.

Note: Many sharing and permission rules are determined by your SharePoint administrator. Use this article as a basic guide to understand what you can control as a site owner. Partner with your SharePoint administrator to make changes to your organization's governance strategy.

Roles and responsibilities for supporting the site

Defining roles and responsibilities while planning and building your site will reduce the need to clean up or reorganize a site when staff members rotate in or out of a team. Site governances should consider including a plan for user training, monitoring site usage, auditing content, and communicating expectations to team members managing the site.

Consider prioritizing and defining the following:

  • Site training for site owners: Provide basic navigation, search, and document management training for new site owners.

  • Site support: Assign a designated site expert on your team to troubleshoot problems and be a liaison to a SharePoint administrator.

  • Site creation and usage guidelines: Often times organization have outlined company policy around site creation. Provide an up-to-date link to the appropriate guidelines, provide contact information for site owners and content authors in case they need assistance.

  • Content publishing and auditing: Plan to audit site and page content as often as necessary to keep the site relevant. Establish an audit schedule and assign content owners for large lists and libraries.

Default SharePoint groups

Title

Default permission level

Used for

Owner

Full control

People who must be able to manage site permissions, settings, and appearance.

Member

Edit and contribute

People who must be able to edit site content. Permission level depends on the site template that was used to create the site.

Visitor

Read only

People who must be able to see site content, but not edit it.

Modern site governance

In modern SharePoint, site governance is more important than in previous versions because there is more control and options to site creation. Your organization's governance depends on how much control your organization needs over content which will determine details for site creation and site-owner governance. Your SharePoint administrator can help you understand policies around security requirements, government regulations, corporate branding, accessibility, and training guidelines. Work with your SharePoint administrator to learn more about your organization's site creation and usage policies before creating your site governance plan.

Modern SharePoint site navigation structure

The most effective SharePoint sites help users find what they need quickly so that they can use the information they find to make decisions, learn about what is going on, access the tools they need, or engage with colleagues to help solve a problem. Learn more about planning site navigation in SharePoint.

Part of your information architecture might include classification of information. If the information you're publishing has high value to the company, requires special security, or is covered by regulatory compliance rules, consider setting up a classification scheme to identify specific types of content that need to be managed carefully. After you've organized information into specific lists and libraries, you can use governance features to manage how the content is viewed.

Modern SharePoint architecture is designed to be flexible and adaptive to changing needs of your organization. Modern sites can be associated to hub sites. The associated sites share navigation and branding with the hub. If enabled by the hub site owner and the site owners approve, the associated sites can also share hub permissions.

Consider the following when determining your site's navigational structure:

  • What kind of content will you have on the site? How will that translate into pages, lists, and libraries?

  • How will information be presented in the site?

  • How will site users navigate through the site?

  • How will information be targeted to specific audiences?

  • How will search will be configured and optimized?

Managing permissions in modern sites

The integrity, confidentiality, and privacy of your organization's mission-critical information rests on how secure you make your site—specifically, to whom you choose to grant access to your site. Managing permissions in modern sites involves both users and groups of users. Permissions in modern communication and team sites come from the site templates that provide different options. for each site.

Communication sites are not associated to Microsoft 365 groups and have three default roles - Site owners, Site members, and Site visitors.

Here are some tips to keep in mind when you're developing a permissions strategy:

  • Follow the Principle of Least Privilege: Give people the lowest permission levels they need to perform their assigned tasks.

  • Use standard default groups: Give people access by adding them to standard, default groups (such as Members, Visitors, and Owners).

  • Consider segmenting your content by security level: Create a site or a library specifically for sensitive documents, rather than having them scattered in a larger library and protected by unique permissions.

Modern site permissions by title

Title

Permission level

Has permission to:

Site owner

Full control

In addition to everything a Site member can do, owners can also:

Change the site theme

Change navigation layout

Change the site logo

Add or remove site owners

Edit site member settings

Add or remove site visitors

Edit site settings

Delete the site

Add a Microsoft 365 group

Associate the site to a hub

Site member

Edit and contribute

Add, edit, and delete lists

Add, edit, and delete document libraries

Add or remove site members

Add, edit, and remove documents

Add, edit, and delete a page

Add, edit, delete a news post

Add, edit, and delete page sections

Add, edit, and delete web parts

Add, edit, and delete site navigation

Create or delete page templates

View site usage metrics

Site visitor

Read only

View content

More resources for site owners:

Storage limits

An administrator might have set a limit on the amount of disc storage your group can use. You need to find out if there is a limit and, if so, decide how you will apportion it amongst your sites, pages, and libraries.

By default, SharePoint Server imposes a 50 MB limit on the size of a single document that can be uploaded into a document library. Also, by default, Team site owners receive alerts when storage is at 90% of quota.

After you know what your limits are, you can use features like version or audit tracking to ensure your site stays within them.

Search

Content appears in many places including sites, lists, libraries, web parts, and list columns. By default, when someone searches your site, all the content on the site and pages appear in the search results.

As a site owner, you can choose whether or not the content on your site appears in search results. When you prevent the content of a site from appearing in search results, the content of all the subsites below it also is blocked from appearing in search results.

By default, content with restricted permissions does not appear in search results for users who don't have the permissions to read it. You can change that so that restricted content does display in search results, but users won't be able to open content they don't have permission to.

Data protection

Backup and recovery features protect your data from accidental loss. The frequency of backup and the speed and level of recovery are set up by an administrator. For recovering content in your site, learn more about recovering items in the recycle bin.

More resources

How to create a site

How to delete a site

Plan your communication site

Get inspired with the Look book

Productivity library

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