I'm working with a client that is on Sharepoint 2010 Enterprise and wants to have a big Document Library full of different document sets/folders (hundreds/thousands potentially) which they would  like to be able to share externally with freelancers, even down to individual document level. 

The problem is the ceiling on the number of unique permissions of around 1000 security scopes for the library and how quickly you would reach this by permissioning individual documents for thousands of freelancers. Also an issue is the admin overhead of maintaining all these permissions.

I'm struggling to come up with a solution that would work long term. I've considered:

• New authentication provider using Claims based authentication which would allow externals to manage their own accounts via email address, but the sticking point is always going down to document level perms in the same library.
• Using additional sites for collaboration externally which are separately permissioned and some custom code to copy the files to the new site then reconcile at the end of collaboration with the main site. 
• A SharePoint Designer Workflow to assign permissions

They are adamant that they don't want the hassle of copying/moving files to another location, but I'm curious what you would all suggest? They currently use Google Drive to do this as it lets them share via email address on a document by document basis but they'd obviously prefer to use one solution so they don't have to deal with duplicates, copying etc. I'm guessing that Google Drive/Docs works differently in terms of permissions model, or they haven't hit the scaling limit yet! SharePoint Online and 2013 etc are not going to be possible here I've been told, sadly. 

 

• Edited by robin thakur 2 hours 0 minutes ago

I assume external people all see a document or not, instead of a fine grained permission division per freelancer?

There's the permission limit which you can't get around (and also affects performance in a bad way). Can't you have 1 source lib for internal people, and have a workflow or something copy files to another lib that can be accessed by external people?

If that's not an option, I'm thinking: build a web part that accesses documents that are located in a lib that can't be accessed by anyone and which uses its own security mechanism (ie store permissions in your own db model) and use BCS to solve any searching issues.