SharePoint Permission Levels in Production for Developers

Question

Hi, We are trying to clean up our SharePoint (MOSS 2007) environment.

As of right now, our developers, System Administrators and Content Administrators all have "Full Access" rights to the root site (and just about everything underneath it) in our production environment. I think that is a terrible practice and feel confident that our Content Administrators don't need anything greater than "Design", maybe even "Contribute" rights.

My question for all of you is, What permission level should a developer have in a production SharePoint environment?

I kind of believe that a developer should have no greater level of access in production than anyone else. After all, they should not be changing ANYTHING in production themselves, correct?

Answer 1

I'm right with you - a developer should have the same access that a regular user has - no way should they be able to change things in production. On that note, they should have "user" access in the test environment as well, to make sure there isn't anything in their code that requires elevated permissions.

Answer 2

It is often wise to have a second account with elevated permissions, if it is at all needed. That way, the developers/testers use their ordinary accounts as everybody else, but may need their second admin account occasionally to read logs etc.

Answer 3

Hello, When It comes to SharePoint Development, Best Practice says: let every developer have their own develop server. I believe that the developers should also have access to the integration environment, but that's about it. I don't think the developers should have any access to the Production environment, specially not with their own users. As Øyvind Skaar said, if any access is required, it should be granted to a different user account.