In SharePoint 2010, providing users have sufficient permissions,
they can add various web parts available on the site. In
larger organizations, various users have different skill levels and
although some categories of users might be allowed to edit the page
- you might want to restrict who can add which web parts to the
page.
Let's say we want to restrict Content Editor web part from being
added by a specific user or group of users. Let's see what's
involved:
1. As an administrator of the site, in my case
http://intranet.contoso.com, log into the web part gallery:
http://intranet.contoso.com/_catalogs/wp/
2. Locate the web part you want to restrict, in my case Content
Editor and access the permission management page for the web part
as shown below:
3. By default, all of the web part definition files inherit the
permissions from the parent web. Click Stop Inheriting to define
unique permissions applicable to your case.
4. Since in our case, we explicitly removed one of the users
from accessing the Content Editor web part in web part gallery,
let's see how his view changes with this new setting: Sure
enough, the user is now not able to add the web part to the
page.
Remember, this trick does not apply to web parts that have been
already added to the site. In other words, you can't choose to
disallow a particular group of users to view the web part already
added to the site. The reason being is that web part definition
file is used only once when the web part is added to the page. This
web part definition XML initializes default properties that will be
set to the instance of the web part. Once the web part is added to
the page, the definition XML resides within a page along with
properties you might have tweaked after you added the web part.
If you're an administrator and would like to keep a better track
of who is uploading which web parts to your site without
necessarily restricting it - you can set up an alert on your web
part gallery and receive a summary of activity on the site:
Enjoy!
This article was originally posted on
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