SharePoint 2010 for Project Management, 2nd Edition

Adding Site Members

Before you can add project stakeholders as members of your PMIS, you have to be familiar with how your SharePoint environment is set up. This is a good opportunity to contact your IT/IS department and ask how users are added to SharePoint sites. If you are using a Microsoft environment, users are usually identified in SharePoint by their respective Windows accounts.

Figure 4-1. SharePoint groups

Once you know how user accounts are set up in your SharePoint environment, you are ready to add site members to your PMIS. Site members can be added to SharePoint either manually (adding them yourself) or by requesting site access (users request that they be added as site members to the PMIS).

Adding members manually assumes that the site owner has identified the stakeholders who will access the site and already knows their associated SharePoint usernames. If you don’t have this information, ask the IT/IS department to assist you in identifying the usernames.

These are the basic steps for manually adding site members:

1. Click Site Actions→Site Settings (Figure 4-2).

   

   Figure 4-2. Site Settings page

2. In the “Users and Permissions” column, click “Site permissions”.

3. Click the Grant Permissions button on the Permission Tools ribbon (see Figure 4-3).

   

   Figure 4-3. Grant Permissions

4. The Grant Permissions page will be displayed (Figure 4-4). Complete the following fields:

   Select Users

   Enter the Windows username (typically, you will use existing Windows accounts to add users in SharePoint).

   Grant Permissions

   Assign the user to a SharePoint group with a predefined permission set, or define permission level directly.

   Send E-Mail

   Specify whether a confirmation email will be sent to the user and, if so, enter the message that will be sent. (Remember, sending email only works if the IT/IS department has enabled this feature on the SharePoint server.)

   

   Figure 4-4. Grant Permissions page

5. Click OK to finish adding the member.

The second method for adding site members is to have the stakeholder access the PMIS and request access. Anytime a user tries to access a SharePoint site that he doesn’t have permission to access, an error page (see Figure 4-5) will be displayed containing a link to request access (if the access request feature is enabled). If the access request feature is not enabled, the only way for an individual to gain access to a PMIS is by having the site owner add the site member manually. Access requests from users will be sent via email to the site owner, who can grant or deny access.

Figure 4-5. Access Denied page