view only permission for communication sites

[null null]

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 let me know, how do i implement this policy for the document library for the visitors who have read access.

thanks

[#2]

Do you not want them to read the documents at all?

[#3]

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. 

[#4]

Yep, Sean is correct...the only way I see to solve this is the following:
(1) Try to type the Urls to access security configuration for your communication site and create your security stuff
(2) Do it by some PowerShell / programming

[#5]

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

[#6]

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.

[#7]

Well, the good news is, I'm not crazy :)

[#8]

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.

[#9]

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