Sharepoint 2013 : Security and Policy - SharePoint Security Groups - Adding Users to a Group

SharePoint security groups are groups of users, defined within a site collection, and assigned permissions to secured objects. Security groups work to make administration of security easier by collecting users in groups according to their access role. For example, the default Visitors, Members, and Owners groups of a site collection establish separation of users that have permissions to view secured objects (visitors), write and change secured objects (members), and enjoy full access to secured objects (owners). Follow these steps to view the current groups in the site collection:

1. Click the gear icon (from the top right of the home page of the site collection).
2. Click Site Settings from the menu.
3. Under the Users and Permissions heading, click the People and Groups link.
4. By default, SharePoint will open a page of the Members group.
5. From the quick launch left navigation, click the Groups heading.
6. You should see a page like Figure 1.

Notice, in Figure 1, that SharePoint created default groups, described as follows:

• [Site Name] Members—This group has Contribute permission level access to the site; thus, any users in this group have contribute access to the site and subsites that inherit permissions from this site. Add those users to this group whom you wish to allow contributor access, so those users may add, edit, or delete content in lists and containers, and edit pages and other content.
• [Site Name] Owners—This group has Full Control permission level access to the site; thus, any users in this group have full control access to the site and subsites that inherit permissions from this site. Add those users to this group who have ownership rights, so those users may add, edit, or delete content and change, add, edit, or delete lists, subsites, and so on.
• [Site Name] Visitors—This group has Read permission level access to the site; thus, any users in this group have read access to the site and subsites that inherit permissions from this site. Add those users to this group who have read-only access to see content in lists and subsites, but who may not change anything.
• Excel Services Viewers—This group allows rendered view only of pages, list items, and documents using server rendering. For example, users in this group only cannot download documents to open in Microsoft Word. This group primarily provides access to users for Excel Services–rendered sheets.

Publishing and Enterprise site collections have the following additional default groups:

• Approvers—Users added to this group have approval rights for any lists that have content approval enabled.
• Designers—Users added to this group have design rights .
• Hierarchy Managers—Users in this group have hierarchical change rights.
• Restricted Readers—Users in this group have restricted read rights.

All security groups in SharePoint work the same way via the SharePoint user interface. For the sake of brevity, the sets of steps in the following subsections discuss adding and removing users from the Members group, via the page in Figure 1, but the same steps apply to any other group in SharePoint.