We're experiencing some weird problems with the permissions on our Sharepoint. We have set the permissions on the top-level site (parent - http://companyweb) and we also have about 5 different subsites inheriting the permissions from the parent site. Inside the 5 subsites, there are different lists and documents. A while back we've set the permissions on some of the lists to inherit from the parent site, but then we changed our mind and set unique permissions to them. For some reason, after a few days its resets back to inheriting its permissions from the parent site. Question(s): 1. When you set the permission on a subsite to inherit its permissions from the parent site, does it propagate down to all the lists/galleries/documents inside it? 2. Is there a reason why the unique permissions that are set to some of the lists/documents are reset back to inherit its permissions from the parent site? 3. How can #2 be fixed or prevented? **We do not use Sharepoint Groups as there are a lot of different permissions that we set for each lists,subsites,etc.. and its a PITA in making up names and maintaining them** any help would be appreciated. thanks!

>on the top-level site (parent - http://companyweb) Comanyweb is what SBS users call this. Is this installation on SBS 2003 or 2008 ? Also if you don't use SP Groups, what do you use ? Individual Users only ?2010 Books: SPF 2010; SPS 2010; SPD 2010; InfoPath 2010; Workflow etc. 2007 Books: WSS 3.0; MOSS 2007; SPD 2007; InfoPath 2007; PerformancePoint; SSRS; Workflow Both lists also include books in French; German; Spanish with even more languages in the 2007 list.

Yes, its on a SBS 2003 environment. And we use individual users rather than creating SP groups. Any ideas? Im thinking that it could be a bug..

anyone??!?!?

This may be an amateur response, but here's what I've found in my own environment of 18k users... 1. Setting an object to inherit from it's parent will only cascade the inheritance to any other object that this object is a parent of. For example, you have something like this: Site A (unique permissions) SubSite B (unique permissions) Doc Lib A (inherit from parent) Doc Lib B (unique permissions) If you set SubSite B to inherit from parent (Site A), then Doc Lib A also gets those permissions. Doc Lib B is still uses it's own permissions. 2. Users with the ability to manage permissions go in and change the permissions. You have no idea that they did that and don't have trace back to this activity unless you have auditing turned on. Most of the time, it's a game of "surprise, surprise" -- You surprised them by changing the permissions and not telling them, then they surprise you by changing them back without telling you. All the while, everyone blames SharePoint and thinks it's a bug. 3. Preventing this from happening is easy to say, but hard to do in the real world, depending on how large your environment is. Limiting the number of people who can manage permissions is the biggie. Establishing good communication amongst this group of users is also important. Otherwise, there are some 3rd party solutions you can purchase that will allow you to manage your environment with an iron fist. AvePoint, Bamboo, and DeliverPoint are worth a look.

the weird thing is that no one is modifying the permissions, but for some reason it still reverts back from when it has inheriting after a few days or so.. i guess no one is experiencing the same issue nor Microsoft seen this issue yet..

We are having the same issue you are having. Permissions are reset randomly. This appears to occur without any interaction within the SP site. We do not have many users, and have limited access to change permissions. The individual permissions are reset to inherit, even though not one database or folder is setup to inherit. We are looking for a SP consultant to look into the problem. We've had two people ask about how our AD was set-up. I am not sure if the server with AD would have any "influence" over our SP server permissions, but it is worth having someone look into it.

I would suggest to enable auditing so that we can have some audit logs to chek with if a user is added or deleted from a site collection it is logged in to the audit log. This tells us that who and when a user deleted or added. Security Group Member Add Security Group Member Delete ->Even when we delete the security group or break the inheritance from the site it is logged is as below: Security Role Bind Inherit Security Role Bind Break Inherit Security Group Delete