Depending on your multi-user authoring environment and needs, it may be important to control who can access content in the Library and how it can be accessed. The Developer allows you to set the following permissions on any folder and its contents. 

The following permissions can be set for any folder in the Library:

• List Folder Contents: Authors cannot save to folders with this permission. An author can view the names of documents in a Library folder but cannot open a document in any editor and perform actions that would change the document content or its location in the Library. An author also cannot make a copy of the document in any way.
   
• Read: An author can open a document in an editor, but cannot perform any actions that would change the document content or its location in the Library. An author can make a copy (including Save as) of the document and store it in a folder location to which they have appropriate permissions.
   
• Modify: An author has complete access to the folder and its documents and can perform any action (create, modify, copy, delete, publish, export, and so on).

When an author works in a folder with documents that have List or Read permissions, they are alerted when they cannot perform an action due to permission restrictions. Each folder and document in the Library (or the Details view of the Outline Editor) displays the active permission setting in the Permission column which can appear in any view.

Authors should understand the following publishing consideration for documents that have a mix of List and Read permissions. If you open a module or section (in the Outline Editor) with Read or Modify access that contains links to other documents with List access, the documents with List access do not appear in published output.

An author cannot publish content with List Folder Contents permission to the System/Publishing/Styles folder. You should make sure that all authors have at least Read permission to the appropriate Publishing Project documents in this folder.

Also note that an author cannot assign roles to documents with List Folder Contents permission to the System/Roles folder. In general, all authors should have at least Read permission to the System folder or any subfolder within it. If an author has List Folder Contents permission to the System folders, functions such as publishing/preview, role and template assignment, topic editing and recording, attachment icon assignment, applying styles from a style sheet stored in a System folder, and so on, do not work.

Note: You must work online to configure security permissions.

You can assign these permissions to each folder in the Library for any author or group (or a combination of both). A group is a collection of authors that makes permission assignment easy. For example, you configure a folder permission for each author individually or you configure a folder permission for a group of several authors.

Note: If conflicting folder permissions are set for an author that has membership in multiple groups, the least restrictive permission is used.

When you add a new author without setting explicit folder permissions, the author is automatically added to a group called "Everyone". By default, this group is configured with Modify permission to all folders in the Library (from the root folder). Keep this in mind as you begin to configure folder permissions for new authors or groups. For example, you may want to consider changing the permission on the Everyone group first and then set permissions for an author or other group. Or, you can leave the Everyone permission setting as is and further restrict permissions for an author or other group.

Note: You cannot remove an author from the Everyone group. The Everyone group cannot be deleted.

Permission inheritance

Inheritance allows administrators to easily assign and manage permissions. Inheritance automatically causes objects (documents or folders) within a container (folder) to inherit all of the permissions of that container. For example, documents within a folder, when created, inherit the permissions of the folder. Similarly, subfolders created within a folder inherit the permission of the parent folder. However, you can always change the permissions of any subfolder and override those inherited from its parent.

Assigned and Effective permissions

Permissions can either be explicitly assigned to an author or in effect due to folder inheritance or group membership. Explicitly assigned author permissions take precedence over group permissions when assigned to the same folder. You can view Assigned and Effective permissions using the Folder Permissions command.

Lost documents

Lost documents (new or edited documents) can result if permissions change when an author is working offline. For example, if an author had Modify permissions to a folder and then went offline while the administrator changed your permissions to List Folder Contents. Any new or edited document will be identified as a lost document when the author reconnects and begins working online. If this happens, an author can display the Lost documents view and recover the documents by moving them to a folder with valid permissions. The status bar of the Developer displays a message when lost documents are detected.

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