Good Morning,
I've run into a peculiar issue with a SharePoint Web Application I am putting together for our organization. In this web application, there is a subsite for each department, and each subsite possesses unique permissions. This allows me to permit
members of that department contribution rights to their site, while the rest of the organization has read-only access.
For example:
Technology Subsite Technology Owners – Domain\Admin Technology Members – IT Department Group
Technology Visitors – Domain\Domain Users
What is interesting is that visitors are unable to search the web parts – when they attempt to do so, they get a 0 results message. So if a document titled “Test” is put into a Document web part, and keywords: Ninja, Panda, Sanitizer are added to it, whether
a visitor searches by title or keyword it yields zero results even when they can see the file under the web part without searching.
Unless…
I figured this might be a permissions issue, so I added a user account to Technology Members and to see if they could search, and they could. What I found peculiar is that even after I removed that account from the Members group, defaulting them back to the ‘visitor’ group, they could still pull up results in the search. But if I took an account that hadn’t been added to Technology Members and ran a search, they’d pull up 0 results. Weird, right? Alas, it is SharePoint.
So it seems that giving someone contribution rights to the site, then having them log into the subsite, before removing their contribution rights, allows them to continue to search without being able to modify anything. Obviously, I don’t want every user in the organization to have contribution access to every subsite. People around here can be rather trigger happy when it comes to modifying or deleting stuff they shouldn’t. But I do need the entire organization to be able to search each other’s subsites.
Any ideas or suggestions? Thanks!