Subsequent Alert Issue when Major and Minor versions are turned on.
Consider the following scenario:
- We have a document library with the following settings:
o Name – Major and Minor Version – Alert Issue
o Permission – Unique Permissions. We have broken the permissions and the library no longer inherits the permissions from the top level site collection.
- We now add a user to the top level site with Read Permissions
- The same user is added to the document library with Read permissions
- For a better clarification, following is the versioning settings for the document library:
- Now the user with Read permission logs on to the site and subscribe for an Alert for the document library. The user gets the initial alert email about the alert being created for the Document Library.
- To distinguish, I have the site admin logged in to the document library and create a alert for him. The site admin now uploads a new document to the document library.
- We see that the user with Read only permissions does not get a subsequent alert, but the site admin does.
Conclusion:
If the user has Read permissions over a document library and if the document library has “Major and Minor” versioning turned on, then the user with the read permission will not get an alert.
This is a by-design issue.
Work-Arounds:
- Turn Off Major and Minor versioning and either keep Major versioning on or Minor versioning on, but not both.
- Give the user edit permission over the document library. This can be done either by assigning Contribute permission to the user or by editing the permission levels for the site.
Reason:
The user only has read permission and not edit permission over the library and its items. When a new item is inserted, the document is saved as draft and now published on the site. Thus, the document is not final. Thus, the user will not get an alert. But for the user who has edit permission, can approve the document and thus need to be notified about the document change so that the user can approve/reject the draft version.
If we follow the logic, it seems that the code is considering a minor point version (v1.2, v1.2, v1.3) only relevant for an Approver. This is incorrect logic based on how security trimming/visibility is working for the user. If a user is able to see a document then the alert system should be triggering on any change or, at a minimum, the library settings should allow the administrator to control this behavior if the current logic is deemed to be valid in some scenarios.
Is there any way that the user has only read permissions for the doc library but still receive the alerts?
Arshia
April 9, 2009 at 4:47 pm
If the user is added with “Read Only” rights, that means he has access only to the major version of the published item.
If we go by the logic, lets say, we have an web application where, domain\user is a external user and doc.docx is a document which is updated regularly by various internal users. We have to make sure that only the final data is seen by the end users. According to SharePoint, we need to add users as Read-Only or Visitors in such a scenario.
So, when multiple internal users modify the document regularly, they will create multiple minor versions. Once the team has finalized the data, they can publish the major version. The end user will read this document.
So, the user should get only updates for the final document and not for the ones that are changed regularly.
Thus, this is By-Design, with proper reasoning to support why this feature is designed in such a way. The user should have permission greater than Read or we need to keep only one of the versioning enabled on the library.
amolghanwat
April 28, 2009 at 7:42 pm