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null null's avatar
null null
Iron Contributor
Mar 20, 2018

view only permission for communication sites

Hi,   i have created a communication site and i dont want the documents to be downloaded by the visitors. However, i have not found the view-only permission access level.   Could you please...
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Sean Bugler's avatar
Sean Bugler
Brass Contributor
Mar 20, 2018

Modern sites (Communication Sites, Team Sites) seem to be dropping the View permission level from the default permission levels.

That said you're still able to add custom permission levels if you'd like to recreate it. 

Tom Castiglia's avatar
Tom Castiglia
Iron Contributor
Aug 20, 2018

Hi Sean -

Have you confirmed this?  I created a custom group named View Only Users and applied a custom permission level for View Only that replicated the identical permissions in the native View Only permission level.  However, users in this group were not be able to access the site at all (or only for a few moments) before getting redirected to the generic access denied page.  If I added the user to Visitors group, they would get the expected Read access.

 

Thoughts?

Tom Castiglia

  • Sean Bugler's avatar
    Sean Bugler
    Brass Contributor
    Aug 20, 2018
    Tom,

    What a strange development. I had tested it previously with no issues when I posted back in March. However when assigning someone to that same permission level now I experience the issue you just described.
    Just now I went so far as to replicate every permission from the read permission level to see if it was a restriction on custom permission levels in general, but that doesn't seem to be the case. I'll keep poking around to see if there's some odd nuance I'm missing.
    • Tom Castiglia's avatar
      Tom Castiglia
      Iron Contributor
      Aug 20, 2018
      Also, I tried various permutations of my custom View Only permission level. When I exactly replicated the native View Only. It sort of worked ("Open in Word" was hidden from menu, but Download was still displayed). Then I tweaked a couple of permissions and I got it to hide the Download option. But 5 minutes later I did a page refresh and my user was redirected to the access denied page. Now I get that pretty consistently.
      • JHerschel's avatar
        JHerschel
        Iron Contributor
        Aug 21, 2018

        We had similar request and did the best I could using the following

        1. Created a view that removed the checkbox of individual documents

        2. Enabled Auditing > log the view of all items

        3. Library settings > advanced settings > open files in browser

         

        I wasn't able to lock users down from downloading, but did the best I could to have them only 'view' them in browser.  Hope this helps

    • Tom Castiglia's avatar
      Tom Castiglia
      Iron Contributor
      Aug 20, 2018
      Well, the good news is, I'm not crazy :)

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