Hi all! I need to set up folders in office365 (~220 folders) and each one with different permissions. These permissions will change pretty often. The folder will contain sensitive data, so the users can not share, just the department principal, each folder will be shared with 6-7 people. So i need an easy and user friendly way to manage these folders, like in Onedrive (simpler if it is possible). As far i can see it is possible in sharepoint online, but its really complicated to set the permissions. Any idea?

Could you create an Office 365 Group for each plan and assign membership of the group to the people who need access? The advantage of this approach is that it uses standard Office 365 functionality (each group has a SharePoint document library) and can all be automated with PowerShell.

Like TonyRedmond I would suggest a group per student with a plan, or maybe even better use a separate Team for each. This way you'll have a simple permission structure and be easily able to delegate permissions to the groups members. The groups email address or chat will allow you to keep conversations related to the plan in one place with the same security, its far better to understand the context around some documents thsn receive them cold.

With that many to create and manage, rather than folders I'd suggest you create separate document libraries with appropriate permissions. The easiest way would be to look at using the PnP powershell commands, and feed a csv file with the folder names, these could also be used to create sharepoint groups to control the permissions and can be created/updated as need via the PnP powershell commands

Agree with Suzanne in the part that managing that amount of folders is not going to be easy...so the idea of using separate document libraries could work, but in the end as advised by Suzanne you are going to need some programming either using PowerShell or other approach

Can i do something to make it more user friendly? As i said soem folder permissions will change often, others not. Some automated method witch create libarys from idk a Sharepoint list, and set the permissions based on the sharepoint columns?

Document storage in sharepoint library | Microsoft Community Hub

11 Replies

Robert Crane
MVP
Jan 27, 2018
Like managing permissions on a file system, so many unique and changing requirements are not easy. The best option is probably a third party tool. Otherwise, you'd need to use something 'unfriendly' like PowerShell to automate the process if you don's want to change the way that you are structuring your data.

As other have suggested, you may want to consider a different structural arrangement like Groups or Teams to solve this issue.
Suzanne Hunt
Brass Contributor
Dec 11, 2017
With that many to create and manage, rather than folders I'd suggest you create separate document libraries with appropriate permissions. The easiest way would be to look at using the PnP powershell commands, and feed a csv file with the folder names, these could also be used to create sharepoint groups to control the permissions and can be created/updated as need via the PnP powershell commands
- jcgonzalezmartin
  MVP
  Dec 11, 2017
  Agree with Suzanne in the part that managing that amount of folders is not going to be easy...so the idea of using separate document libraries could work, but in the end as advised by Suzanne you are going to need some programming either using PowerShell or other approach
  - Róbert Mészöly
    Copper Contributor
    Dec 11, 2017
    Can i do something to make it more user friendly? As i said soem folder permissions will change often, others not. Some automated method witch create libarys from idk a Sharepoint list, and set the permissions based on the sharepoint columns?

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Document storage in sharepoint library

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