It was just recently that I was tasked with creating a simple SharePoint site that had multiple subsites. Some subsites would require access control using all the same groups while others would use a combination of groups and users. The site itself was already built and I viewed the task as being something trivial to do within SharePoint. Little did I know that how the site was created made a huge difference within SharePoint.

It turns out that all of the sites were created to use the parent permissions. This is an option when you create any new site. I would like to say that this blog could stop here, but that is not the case. Several online sources and other references claimed that you could break away from the parent permissions on the subsite. This was true for the site and all of its content, but it never truly released itself from the parent.

I discovered this issue when I would add groups to my subsite (which now had unique permissions) and would than see them on one of the other subsites. I am not sure if its a flaw or just how SharePoint operates, but the only way I found to fix this problem was to delete the site completely and build it with unique permissions from the start.

The idea is simple and almost dumb for posting, but in my case the sites were already built and populated with data and there was no way I wanted to delete them all and start from scratch. So for those who notice that groups and people are being duplicated on all of their sites, you more than likely are sharing parent permissions. SharePoint provides some ways to export your data, but those too are kind of a pain.