Help needed with Sharepoint permissions flow

[pperrot1]

I need help from the experts here...

I have a 2 sharepoint lists:

1. Skill Teams list, with the 'Title' column that lists the skill team names (PD, HR, Mkting, etc) and with a column that shows the respective user groups that were created to the members that need to access the list from each skill team (PD Users, HR Users, etc).

2. Projects List, which is basically a list of projects lead by the different skill teams, with 2 skill team columns: 'Lead Organization' (which is a single value lookup from the first list, where we select the lead skill team for that project), and 'Interdependencies' (which is a multiple-select lookup, where we select all affected skill teams for said project).

I do not have access to Sharepoint Designer, so I want to accomplish the following using Power Automate:

- When an item is created or modified, fill a third column called 'Unique Users' with the user groups derived from the skill teams on both 'Lead Organization' and 'Interdependencies' columns.

- Set item-level permissions to the user groups on the 'Unique Users' column as well as an 'All items users' group, which are admins that need access to all items.

So the end result would be that only "HR Users" and the admins would be able to access HR projects, but if "Mkting Users" were also listed as "Interdependent" on that project, they would be able to see it too.

Any ideas on how to accomplish this? I haven't been able to achieve this by going through Microsoft forums or google... so you guys are my last hope.

I need help from the experts here...

I have a 2 sharepoint lists:

1. Skill Teams list, with the 'Title' column that lists the skill team names (PD, HR, Mkting, etc) and with a column that shows the respective user groups that were created to the members that need to access the list from each skill team (PD Users, HR Users, etc).

2. Projects List, which is basically a list of projects lead by the different skill teams, with 2 skill team columns: 'Lead Organization' (which is a single value lookup from the first list, where we select the lead skill team for that project), and 'Interdependencies' (which is a multiple-select lookup, where we select all affected skill teams for said project).

I do not have access to Sharepoint Designer, so I want to accomplish the following using PowerAutomate:

- When an item is created or modified, fill a third column called 'Unique Users' with the user groups derived from the skill teams on both 'Lead Organization' and 'Interdependencies' columns.

- Set item-level permissions to the user groups on the 'Unique Users' column as well as an 'All items users' group, which are admins that need access to all items.

So the end result would be that only "HR Users" and the admins would be able to access HR projects, but if "Mkting Users" were also listed as "Interdependent" on that project, they would be able to see it too.

Any ideas on how to accomplish this? I haven't been able to achieve this by going through Microsoft forums or google... so you guys are my last hope.

[ChristianAbata]

hi @pperrot1  please could you share an screnshot about what you have?

[pperrot1]

@ChristianAbata

I am trying different approaches, but could not yet get to exactly what I want.

Please see attached a screen shot of each of the lists I'm working with:

This is the main "Projects List", where I want all of the "magic" to happen:

This is the parent, "Skill Teams" list, where I want the User Groups to come from:

My first try was trying to use variables, combined with Get Item and Get Items to gather the user groups related with each project and copy them to the Projects List based on the "Lead Organization" & "Interdependencies" column values. I didn't even get to the "granting item level permission" part, because I couldn't get my "Get Items" to work.

Researching, I also figured out that even if I was able to get all the correct User Groups in the "Unique Users" column, Power Automate doesn't play well with Sharepoint Groups.. so I kinda aborted my ideal solution and decided to temporarily try to test working with manually adding the people that need access to each project (far from ideal, but at least I was able to make it work)... see below. 

The thing is.. there are 65 projects, so manually adding people to each of them is a pain. Also, with what I got so far, if I remove a name from the "Unique Users" column, I do not remove their access. Why did I not add a "remove all permissions" step on the flow? Because I also need all projects to have read permission to a "Master Plan Users" group , which is basically a list of directors that can see all projects (it is around 20-30 people). Since I was not able to figure out a way to work with Sharepoint User Groups in Power Automate, I am just granting additional permissions on my flow.

What I really needed was to keep the user permissions updated if I add or remove skill teams to a project, while maintaining all projects access to that directors group.

I have read a lot about using Rest API and "Send HTTP Requests" to Sharepoint, and sense that might be the solution to most of my problem. But I'm too much of a newbie in all of this to figure out exactly what to do to go this route...

Can you help??

[JimmyWork]

Trying to understand this so please let me know if understanding it wrong.

When a user creates a project, what happens here? How is a project site created?

Is it correct saying that you want to control access to different typed of project based on a input in a column?

If a project site is created i would run a azure runbook in the flow using pnp to create sharepoint groups based the data from a column. I would then have these users in AD group that i would add to the specific SharePoint Groups.

The AD groups would be controlled from your second SharePoint list with a flow saying add user to select group, groups, this way you can remove specific users also from the groups.

You can also make a button in the list that says request access, when pressed a flow will start and request access to the project. Owners of the project can then allow or reject the request.

Sorry if i understood you wrong but i have built a similar solution and im creating a SharePoint group at the specific project site and then adding certain AD groups to the SharePoint group giving them full control or edit or read and so on. You could also create pnp templates from different type of projects that already contains the SharePoint groups and rights and so on. 

[pperrot1]

@JimmyWork , actually, I think I didn't quite explain the background to the project list.

This is actually a pre-defined project list (basically a list of priority projects agreed by the directors for the next year or so). I added all the pre-agreed projects as admin.

The idea is that the end-users only interact with the list through a PowerApp that uses that list as one of its main app datasources.

There are basically 4 interaction types:

- The directors (around 25-30 of them), need to be able to view all projects details and status (all available within the list columns and attachments).

- The team admin or project admin. Each project has its own project admin (who should be able to edit their assigned project only, but shouldn't be able to view the other projects).. and there might be a team admin which can edit and view all projects that their skill team is involved with (both leading projects or collaboration projects). Also, the project or team admins should only have access to edit 2 columns within their items: "Status" and "Attachments"... so I have a separate PowerApp screen within the App with only those two fields available for them to edit (they cannot access the screen with all datacards on edit mode). I know that doesn't completely rule out the possibility of them getting the list's direct link and updating other fields, but that's the best I could do for now.

- The core admin team (about 5 - 6 people) that are able to view and update the entire list... they will basically oversee the work of the project/team admins. Those are the sharepoint owners group.

- Other unique users with view access - basically people identified as part of a specific project.

So the item level permissions should be granted as follows:

- Write access to all projects to the sharepoint owners group (ok by default)

- Write access to all projects assigned to individual users based on the "Project Admin" column (Single people & group column)

- Read access to all projects to a director user group (this is a Sharepoint group, not Office 365 Group)

- Read access to all projects within a skill team granted to that team's admin user group based on the "Lead Organization" (Single people & Group type) and "Interdependencies" columns (Multiple people & group type). The Sharepoint User Groups assigned to each team are available in a separate list called "Skill teams". The "Lead Organization" and "Interdependencies" columns are lookup columns to this list.

Ideally, along with giving access to the list or list item, the flow would also grant those people access to the PowerApps app.. but that's another, secondary part to this story...

Sorry for the long post, but I think now I covered all of it... I'm really hoping one of you can help me out.

I can't add a button so that people can request access, because I cannot have people accessing the list and seeing the available projects (other than the directors and the people involved).

The AD Groups approach though sounds like something that might be on the right track. How does it work?

[JimmyWork]

@pperrot1 Do i understand it correctly, the data is the list, so you do not create a project site?

Im asking this because my solution that uses O365 groups is as followed.

1. List this is used to create a project, enter the data needed for the project. This triggers a flow that creates a Project site/Teams based on the input in the list.

The list will show all available projects with a link to the project site, the project site is the place where i set the access rights, so all users can see available projects but only specific people can access the project site.

But if your project is the columns in the list with attachments then i would in the powerapp use 0365 groups and set visability to only show if the user is in the specific 0365 group.

I guess you can format a column to show if criteria is meet using json also.

Again im sorry if i understand you wrong.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpXrF5NDZbI

https://svaghub.wordpress.com/2018/11/03/role-based-security-in-powerapps-using-spgroups/

https://dynamics365society.uk/archives/security-trimming-powerapps-controls-based-on-office-365-grou...