Giving access to project folders on MS Project Online

Hi Kai,

Thank you for your message in this forum.

According to your description, it seems that you have two question: for the first question, you have shared your Project site with the others, however, they lose access after a while. For the second question, you just give different users unique permission to access different Projects. Since you don’t know how to give different users permission to access different Projects, so you create a 0 days task to each project, so the other people can access specific Projects.

May I know if the scenario above is consistent with yours? If so, we’d give you suggestions below and hope that will help you:

1.      For the first question, generally, if we share a site with the others, unless you remove the other’s permission to access the site, the others will not lose access after a while. To better understand your situation, could you provide the details about how you share a Project site with the others?

If the scenario above is not consistent with yours, could you provide more details about your requirement?

Best Regards,

Sukie

Hi Sukie,

Thank you so much for your reply.

To answer the first scenario, I share the folders with different team members (when they don't have a task allocated to them for a specific project) by going to the specific project's project site and clicking on 'Share' at the top right corner of the page. That allows me to invite people by inputting their email addresses (they will get an email invitation). The permission level for this will be set to 'Contribute'. When sharing the site like this, the people I have shared the site with will lose access after a while (we haven't really figured out the time interval for this). 

For the second scenario, we have a lot of projects with the same client which means sometimes a team member will need to access some project folders for documents but this team member does not have a task allocated to them in that specific project as they are not expected to complete any tasks for that specific project. This means that they won't be included in the project schedule as they do not have a specific task in that project, they just need access to all project folders. As just sharing the site with that team member would mean that the project itself won't show up in their Project Centre and they will lose access after a while; we have created a 0 days task in the project schedule to add all these types of people in.

What we would ideally like to see is that, for example, when Jim works with Project A and needs access to Project B for documentation only, I want to be able to either share the project site of Project B with him without him losing access to it after a while. Or alternatively, we would like Project B to show up in his project centre and for him to have forever access to Project B without him actually having a task assigned in the Project B schedule. 

I hope this clarifies the issues we are having. Thank you again for taking the time to look into this. :) 

Hi Kai,

We appreciate that you posted back and confirmed the information with us.

Per your description, it seems that you wants to share the document of Project B with Jim, and Jim works with Project A and he can only access the document stored in Project B instead of all contents insider Project B.

May I know if my understanding is right? If so, you can refer to the steps below to check it will meet your requirement:

The admin can create an enterprise project, by default the project site isn't created, you need to create the site connected to the project by going to PWA settings > Connected SharePoint sites > click Active. As shown below:

Now you can go to the site > create a library and create a document. Then you can share the document with Jim with unique permission, now Jim has only access to the file in the site. As shown below:

And for more details about how to change the unique permission, you can refer to this article: Change the permissions on a subfolder.

Then you can let Jim sign in Office portal with Jim’s account > go to Project Center and he will find no Project B listed, he can only access the document by the URL you shared with him.

You can refer to the steps above to check they meet your requirement and check if the user will loss the access to the folder after a while.

Thank you for your understanding!

Best Regards,

Sukie

Hi Kai,

May I know if you have seen my reply? May I know if you still need help? The solution I provided above is also to check if it can avoid the permission issue you encountered before, if you still encounter this permission issue after trying the suggestion I provided above, due to the limited resource and we don’t have escalate channel to report this issue, the best way to handle this issue is to raise a ticket, so we’d suggest you contact your Office 365 admin to go to Office 365 admin center to raise a ticket.

If you have any other questions, you can also post back and we still glad to provide help.

Thank you for your understanding!

Best Regards,

Sukie

Hi Sukie,

Unfortunately, this solution has not solved the problem. To clarify, we never have had problems with creating project sites as we have set our PWA up in a way that a project site is automatically created once I check in the new project the first time. 

The problem our company is facing is that all team members will lose access after a while to documents (or project sites) that have been shared with them. The only way we have found to resolve this at the moment is to create a 0 day task in the schedule and allocate this task to them. That doesn't seem like a correct and professional way to do this, hence I posted a comment on this site to get a solution. So what I am asking is, how can we share sites with the team members that won't have a task allocated to them (as they don't need to do any work on this specific project, they just need access to that project's site and documents)? 

Thank you. 

Kai --

I can tell you exactly what is going on with your Project Online system.  It sounds like your application administrator has enabled the Sync User Permissions option for the Enterprise Project Type used to create your projects.  What this means is that every time you publish your project, the system synchronizes the permissions for the Project Site associated with the project. In this process, the system wipes out any special permissions you have specified by sharing the Project Site with people who are not associated with the project.  That is why people are losing access.  When you add those users to the project team, and then you publish the project, that gives those users access to the Project Site so that they will not lose access.  I would recommend that you stop trying to grant special access to Project Sites by sharing the site, and instead, add those people to the project team.  Hope this helps.

Hi Dale,

Thank you for your reply. 

That actually explains it, why people keep losing access, thank you! It does make sense that I need to add them to the Project Team; however, I still should share the site with them as otherwise they won't have access to it (as in the project won't appear in their Project Centre). Is there a way to make it happen that when I add them to the Project Team they will see this project in their Project Site (without adding them to a 0 day task)? 

Thank you again.

Kai --

It sounds like your Project Online system is set up with SharePoint Permissions mode, which is why you have to share the Project Site.  Instead, your application administrator should change the system to Project Permissions mode.  Doing so will create Project Online security groups such as Team Members, Project Managers, Resource Managers, and so on.  He/she will then need to add the users in your organization to the correct security groups.  Once done, you will no longer have this problem.  When you add a team member to a project and then publish the project, the team member will now be able to see the project in the Project Center page and to navigate directly to the Project Site.  Hope this helps.

Hi Kai,

Thank you for posting back. We understand the inconvenience caused by it. And we’re still glad to provide help.

Since you mentioned that the users will lose the access to the site and documents after a while.

Generally, as I mentioned above, if we just share a site with the others, we will not lose the access to the site unless someone removes your permission.

If we share a document with external users with option of Anyone with the link can edit, we can select the Expired date, in this situation, if you set Expired date, the user will lose the access to the file after some time.

If the scenario above is not consistent with yours, the possible way to check if someone removed the permission, you can let Office 365 admin go to Audio log report to check if someone has removed the permission. Office 365 admin can go to https://protection.office.com > Search > click Audit log search(if you have turned on it) and you can check if you can find if someone removed permission. For more details, you can refer to this article: Search the audit log in the Security & Compliance Center.

If the suggestion above doesn’t work, you may need to contact related team to check it from backend. As I mentioned above, due to the limited resource, you may need to contact your Office 365 admin to go to Office 365 admin center to raise a ticket. For more details, you can refer to this article.

You understanding and patience will be highly appreciated!

Best Regards,

Sukie