I’m going to take a short break from mining my experiences with page construction and editing over at the Sharing the Point site to share some newly acquired knowledge right here at “home.” Fear not though, for I’ll be doing so within the context of the already-in-progress “real-world SharePoint 2010 lessons learned” series. How will I manage to accomplish this feat of blogging derring-do?  Read on. Today’s recipe is going to be the granting of permissions, with a dash of upgrading from 2007 content added to taste. While we’ve been working with SharePoint 2010 here at Bamboo for what seems like ages now, we only recently completed the upgrade of our corporate portal to the new platform. Occasionally, we’ll still discover something that didn’t exactly transfer seamlessly during the upgrade, and the other day I learned that one of those things was my Full Control permissions on my team’s site.  But wait, I’m getting ahead of myself. I needed to grant Full Control within my team’s site to another colleague and, though this was my first time doing so on 2010, I didn’t anticipate any difficulty. I started selecting the Site Settings button under the Site Actions drop down in the site: On the resulting Site Settings page, however, I didn’t see anything relating to permissions, so I reached out to Brett, Bamboo’s SharePoint Admin extraordinaire, and said it looked like I had been stripped of my Full Control permissions in the upgrade to 2010. He quickly responded, saying, “Try it now.” Bingo.  I was suddenly looking at an entire menu of available options on the Site Settings page, and I clicked the Site Permissions link under the (now present and accounted for) Users and Permissions heading, which led me to the Permissions page for the site, with Permission Tools helpfully pre-selected in the Ribbon.  From there, I clicked the Grant Permissions button: On the resulting Grant Permissions form, I filled in what at first glance struck me as being the appropriate information, selecting the Add users to a SharePoint group (recommended) radio button … after all, it was the recommended route and all, y’know?  As you can see in the red text in the image below, I was told in no uncertain terms that I “do not have permission to add users to the selected SharePoint group,” and was quickly reminded that even Full Control only gets you so far (and that sometimes even the “recommended” route may not be what you need). Take two involved clicking the other available radio button, to Grant users permission directly, and suddenly I was looking at all of the of the options I had been looking for in the first place … if only I hadn’t been fooled that dang parenthetical “recommended” tag! And with that, I had accomplished my mission, learned another lesson, and ended up with a blog worthy tale in the bargain.  Read the entire SharePoint 2010 Lessons Learned series:

• Part 1: Wrestling with Images & Links
• Part 2: How to Create a Blog
• Part 3: How to Create a New Page (and Delete a Page)
• Part 4: How to Grant Permissions
• Part 5: An Image-uploading Caveat Regarding Anonymous Access, and Frustration Involving Modifying Font Styles
• Part 6: A Cautionary Tale Involving Deleting Photos While Editing a Blog Post
• Part 7: What’s Up with Out-of-the-Box Web Analytics for Blogs?
• Part 8: ‘What? I Can’t Embed Video in a Blog Post? You’re Kidding, Right?’