How To Provide Read Access To Microsoft Team Documents

Introduction

In this article, we will explore how to provide read access to users on Microsoft Team Documents.

Microsoft teams are the chat-based workspace in Office 365. If you would like to explore what Microsoft teams are then you can follow this URL.

Scenario

There are two important roles in Microsoft Teams,

1. Admin (Full Control)
2. Member (Contribute)

If you are using Microsoft teams, then there is a good chance the customer/user/admin will ask this question: ‘how to provide read access to all the team documents’?

A couple of scenarios

1. Provide read access to all members to Team’s documents
2. Provide read access to the specific user to all the documents

This article explains step-by-step approach with detailed steps to accomplish this,

Pre-requisite 

The user should have office 365 subscription.

The user should have admin rights (Full Control) on the respective Team.

Background

Remember - if you create a new team in Office 365 then the system automatically configures team frameworks for you which gives the below feature,

1. Three tabs as shown in below screenshot,
   
   
   1. Conversations (Group chat)
   2. Files (Microsoft SharePoint Online site collection with a pre-configured library as well as permissions like Admin, Member, Visitor)
   3. Wiki (like a web page to add more static/dynamic content)
      
      

2. Two Office 365 groups – Admin, Members
3. Group Mailbox

Scenario 1 - Provide read access to all members to Team’s documents

Steps 1

Open respective Team workspace in the browser or team client application and click on ‘Files’ tab as shown in the below screenshot,

 

 

Step 2

Click on ‘Open in SharePoint’ option as shown in below screenshot,

 

Step 3

Now, your SharePoint online site document library will open in another tab of the same browser.

 

Step 4

Click on site settings and site permission option as shown in the below screenshot,

 

Step 5

Now, you can switch permission level of members to ‘Read’ as shown in the below screenshot,

 

Scenario 2 - Provide read access to a specific user to all the documents

Step 1 

Repeat the steps until step 4 as explained in Scenario-1 above.

Step 2

Click on ‘Advanced permissions settings' as shown in below screenshot,

 

Step 3

Open visitor group as shown in the below screenshot,

 

Step 4

Click on ‘New’ and then ‘Add Users’ option,

 

Step 5

It will open a pop-up window to add users. Type username/email address and click on ‘Share’ button.

Please refer to the below screenshot,

 

Note
If a user belongs to multiple SharePoint groups then the system gives higher privileges to the user.