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Another instance of "Mystery of Limited Access"

Limited Access: The phrase means so much, but says so little to many SharePoint Adminstrators!

Ran into an issue today where the permissions on a list appeared not to be applying correctly. The site administrator reported that one user was unable to edit any items in the list, despite having been given Contribute permissions directly on the list.

After all the usual questions on permission inheritance and what kind of error message was received, we looked at the Check Permissions output. Turns out the user was listed as having Contribute and Limited Access. And this seemed correct, the user could contribute items to the list, but was unable to edit any of the items he tried to edit.

Limited Access, the phrase which means so much and yet so little to many SharePoint administrators!

Turns out the real issue was that the list was set to only allow edits of items the user had created. So Check Permissions was not lying: The user has contribute permissions, and some "other permissions" -- like editing the items he/she has created -- but could not edit other items.