Hi, today I was notified that some of our staff didn't have access to a particular list anymore. I checked the permissions and had to realise that all of the lists within the same site had lost their permissions. Only one group was left, which was the "Intranet support" (myself) group. I checked the Site itself, which is containing the lists and those permissions were fine. How could this possibly have happened? Is there anything I could have accidentally done to change all of the access permissions across 7 different lists within the same site, without realising it?

Hi, there might be a possibality that all those lists were inheriting permissions from parent site/subsite, and during restructuring/removing permissions from parent site, you/someone else could have removed the sharepoint groups in order to create the new ones. If auditing is enabled on site might help finding if someone else has deleted the users/groups.. Hope this helps, Regards, Rohan

Hi Rohan, unfortunately auditing isn't enabled, so I am trying to guess what happened. The thing is: none of the lists inherited permissions, as they were all specific to certain user groups (the lists all did the same kind of thing, just that they were meant to be accessed by different groups). So I am quite positive that a change to the site shouldn't have gone through to any of the lists. Nonetheless, I checked the site and all permissions were still set as they were supposed to (giving all of the groups equal access). That's what stumps me: I don't know of any way to change the permissions on multiple lists at the same time other than through changing the site permissions. Oh, of course the groups couold have been deleted out of the site, but then they wouldn't be in the site permissions anymore, either. Also: I am really the only person who administrates this site. There are some people in the IT department that in theory have got access to it, but very unlikely that they would have changed anything. I just can't figure out how this could have happened...

Hi, By default the permissions set on site inherits to the list as well. so can you show us the current permisions of groups on site? Please also tell is their any action you took lately before you found this problem. Regards,Manvir

Ok, not quite sure what the best way is for me to explain the permissions that are set up, but I will give it a shot. This is the structure of my site (just the basics): - Intranet Portal (Site Collection) - Departments (Site Collection) - Administration (Site) - List A - List B - List C - List D The "Administration" site inherits all permissions from the "Departments" Site Collection: - All staff (read) - Intranet support (full access) - Staff Office A (Limited access) - Staff Office B (Limited access) - Staff Office C (Limited access) - Staff Office D (Limited access) Upto yesterday each of my lists had different access permissions. For example, List A would look like this: - Intranet support (full access) - Staff Office A (Contribute) List B would look like this: - Intranet support (full access) - Staff Office B (Contribute) Then there were also a few approval groups for each of them, but itwould probably make it too complex to explain. This morning I checked and suddenly all the Lists had the following single permission left: - Intranet support (full access) Nothing else. I checked the "Administration" site and it was inheriting the permissions as usual. Nothing had changed here. It was only my lists that had changed since I last checked them. I just noticed that the exact same thing happened in another site: the lists lost their permissions, the site itself was untouched. Now, what have I done since last time that it was working? The only thing it could have been was I created two additional lists in the "Administration" site yesterday. They weren't related to the already existing lists and did something completely different. I assigned some access permissions to those two new lists and the permissions for those two lists are in fact untouched as well. So it is only the old lists that lost their access permissions. Now maybe something happened when I created those two new lists and assigned access permissions to them, but I can't explain how this would have changed the permissions on multiple other lists within the same site at the same time? Thanks for the help, guys.

Hello Andrea, Thanks for this detailed info. Just a quick thought in my mind, what about the sharepoint groups present on the site? Are all those gruops and their respective member accounts are intact as before or they'r lost/changed now?Regards, Rohan

Hi Rohan, all intact. I meanwhile assigned them all back to the lists, but of course I want to figure out what happened so it doesn't happen to me again. I just can't imagine how this happened...