Manage permissions for SharePoint HelpDesk

Manage end-user permissions

As a general rule, you don’t want to allow requesters to see tickets for other requesters. This way, only the helpdesk agents and managers will have the access to the helpdesk site and the end-users will submit the tickets with web widget or email. However, in some cases you can choose to make your help desk site available to all users from your organization. You can choose either option during the installation:

If you choose to install the site as private (the default option), the site will be accessed my the members of a specific group only.

Now it’s a good idea to place web widgets for other users both inside and outside of your organizations to interact with the SharePoint helpdesk. Just navigate to the Widgets tab in Settings and create a new one:

Please note that you can create as many web widgets as you like, each with a unique set of columns and views:

This is how the widget will look for a regular requester:

To see the complete instruction on the web widget, please follow this article.

Manage helpdesk sites and groups

By default, when you install a new helpdesk site, a new MS group is created. Please add agents and helpdesk managers you want to give the access to the specific group. On your HelpDesk site, click the Settings gear icon in the upper-left corner, then navigate to Site Permissions. You will see the default group in the Site members section:

Add your agents to the group here:

Please note that adding to the SharePoint group will not assign a role to each member. To manage roles, please use the Contacts list.

If you have multiple teams in your Support department with their specific responsibilities (for example, each team manages its own product), a good idea is to install a separate Plumsail HelpDesk site for each team.

Please note that you can have as many sites as you wish under a single license for HelpDesk for SharePoint online. After that, you can create separate HelpDesk widgets for each site. Also, please note that you will need to manage the email forwarding for each of your sites separately. The possible options for that include creating a separate helpdesk email or creating forwarding rules. For example, each email containing a specific key word may be forwarded to a specific HelpDesk site. Please read more on email forwarding to proceed.

Create and manage unique permissions

There is no permissions restrictions for the site members by default. It means that all site members will have access to all tickets and comments. This is by design as HelpDesk is built on top of SharePoint, and individual item level permissions management is not considered a best practice by Microsoft.

However, in certain cases you may need to restrict access to a single ticket, for example, a one containing sensitive documents or info. In thic case, you can set up a Power Automate workflow to change the permission settings.

For such a task, a separate tool, Plumsail Actions, is required. Please note that this is a separate product by Plumsail with its own subscription.

To manage item level permissions, please create a flow that will work on Item Selection:

First, we’ll get all the comments for the current ticket with the help of the Power Automate connector (see the documentation on the Power Automate connector). After that, we use Change Permissions action from Plumsail Actions to remove all the permissions for the item and add the permissions back for one specific user. Please note that you can also make the user populated automatically to restrict the access to the ticket Requester or assignee.

Now the access to this ticket is restricted. Though you can leave the flow as it is, you can go further and restrict the access to all comments of that ticket.

Please note that to make the flow visible on the HelpDesk site, you need to share it with SharePoint:

After that, you will have an option to run the flow directly on a single ticket from your HelpDesk site:

Explore more:

• Create multiple HelpDesks for different departments and different mailboxes

• Find internal name of SharePoint Column