(c) Sean Bordner
When you have a site set to inherit permissions from its parent it becomes easy to forget which SharePoint site groups you are working with. I’ve seen this happen more than once, so maybe this short post will spare you the heartache. I find it best when standing up a new sub site to go ahead and inherit permissions from its parent. After I get the content right, I will wrap up by breaking the inheritance and fine tuning the permissions. This way should I decide to ratchet up someone’s perms, it’s not a problem to do so at the sub site level. I can always re-inherit permissions from its parent later should the need arise. This is for a public facing (WCM) site of course, non-public sites vary greatly with permission needs. I’ve seen folks inadvertently grant more rights to site groups then they wanted to b/c they assumed they were only doing so for a specific site. This is not the case if the site is inheriting permissions from its parent, and is why it’s important when tweaking permissions to always ask “who’s your daddy!”
Sean Bordner
MOSSSEO 