SharePoint 2016 - User with Read permissions cannot open document in client application

Question

I have a user within a SharePoint Permission Group. The SP permission group has Read permissions to the document library. We do not have item-level permissions enabled in the library.

The user is using Chrome.

We are aware of the requirement to use the right click context menu in Chrome to force the file to be opened in the client application. However, when the user right clicks on a document, they only have the option "View in Browser."

This is not the right click context menu I would expect to see.

How do we enable this user to open the file in the client application?

Answer 1

The ability to open documents in client application is disabled for users with Read permission by default. They will need at least Contribute permission to access the menu you expect.

You can create a custom permission level using Copy Permission Level button from Contribute permission, then remove the permissions you do not want the users to have.

For example, removing Add Items, Edit Items and Delete Items permissions from Contribute permission will give users the ability to open document using client application in Read-Only mode, and return an "Cannot connect to server" error when they try to edit the document.