SharePoint groups and shared libraries/lists

Question

This is going to be vague, hopefully not annoyingly so. I know very little about SharePoint, but I'm asking for someone who's more knowledgable but is under lots of crippling pressure. Unfortunately I'm going to be held responsible for the project (it's due before Christmas!!), so I need to see what I can figure out on my own to help out. Please allow my desperation and helplessness to excuse any problems with this question.

We've created an InfoPath form that generates xml files that will be uploaded to SharePoint. The data from these files will be aggregated and used to generate reports. The biggest issue is that the users will be spread out over three locations, and the info generated from each location needs to be firewalled from the others. But we need the xml files from all three locations to go to the same place in order to make the aggregation feasible with minimal manual work.

I've read something about SharePoint groups (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262778%28v=office.14%29.aspx) and figured that might be the way of doing it, so long as 1) the xml documents could all go to the same library/repository and 2) that shared repository would only show each group their own documents. For at least two users we also need a master view that shows all of the documents regardless of the group that created them.

That's the main question. Ultimately we'll also need a similar way of storing the generated reports (tables and charts) to the creators of the xml files AND a set of users at each location who won't be able to view or create those xml files. But first things first, I guess.

Is this possible and feasible? Any hints/links that could get us started down this path?

Answer 1

I think in your case the best option is to create a folder for each group, and set permissions on them to allow just the specific group of users to access that folder. The same with a separate library for reports. Then, you'd just setup a list view that flattens the folder hierarchy to view all items at once.

You could also set per-document permission programmatically in an event receiver, however, there's a pretty low limit (search for ACL) on the number of unique access control lists per library (it's 50.000 actually). So depending on the number of XMLs you are going to manage you may reach this limit.