Good day,

Hope everyone is well.  I need some advice on the below and hope someone will be able to guide me in the right direction.

We need a document store solution for an approval framework, the idea being it will be the single source of the truth in terms of what documents business has approved . Currently the doc sits on Sharepoint. 

The issue is we can't control read or write access to it.

Anyone encountered this before - how do we store this and control who can view and who can edit it? 

Thank you and have a great day!

Hi EvdB, Correct me if I am wrong, but what youa re saying is that you have some documents. Some have been approved by the Business, some have not. Currently they sit in a Sharepoint site (presumably all mixed together?).

What you want is to some how distinguish between the two, with maybe the 'Approved' Docs sitting in one place, and the 'Not Approved. sitting elsewhere. Is that correct?

I think the bit that is confussuing is that one the one hand you say you have many docs and require a Document Storage solution (I would assume to clearly show the difference betwen those Docs that are approved and those that are not) and then mention "Currently the doc [singular]...". 

So my first question is this - are we talking one document or many documents? Do they all have the same edit restrictions (no acces to Read & Write) or just the one? 

Sharepoint allows you to have a folder system and shilst Sharepoint as a whole is not my favourite place to put documents, it does have its advantages. Can you place the documents apporived into a new "Approved" folder or is that what you don't have access to?

Push comes to shove I would say create a folder called "Approved", and place approved Docs in there. IN each document, if you have a Version History section, show a line saying when it was approved and by whom. If you use Sharepoint, and approval has come via email, then maybe store the approvals in a sub folder. You don;t have to, but it may be useful later on - someone always asks about a year later "Who approved this...?"

If you send the answers to my questions above then I am sure I can sort something for you.  

Hi EvdB, 

So there are two ways to do this:

1. Set the permissions on the Excel spreadsheet itself

2. Set permissions in Sharepoint.

If I start with the second option - it depends on what version of Sharepoint you are running. As it is a company wide version, I am guessing it may be Sharepoint Server. If this is the case then it has useful defaults values within it. However, by setting these permissions in Sharepoint - you set them for ALL documents in Sharepoint, not just your Excel spreadsheet. so this may not be the best option. However, just so you know what those permissions are see this site:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/sites/user-permissions-and-permission-levels#:~:text=Default%20permission%20levels%20%20%20%20Permission%20level,%20All%20permissions%20%203%20more%20rows%20

If it isn't quite the version of Sharepoint you have, just google the relevant version. There are plenty of help topics out there.

For the first option, you set the permissions in Excel itself. Again, just Google "Setting Excel permissions". There are plenty of helpful videos on YouTube. Again, it depends slightly on what version of Excel you have. 

This should answer your query, but come back if you can't find a suitable answer online. I have had similar queries in the past, so I know the answers are there.