Protection Question

[CJ]

Is it possible to set read and edit permissions on a section, but not delete
permissions?

I have sections I want my staff to be able to edit, but they can also delete
them when they are unlocked. I don't want them to have this ability.

 

[Gary (MS)]

CJ,
OneNote does not allow for the setting of the permissions on sections/pages.
One option would be to use group policy settings on the server or share
permissions. This could allow a user to edit and read a section but not
delete it from the server. One thing to keep in mind is the user can still
delete pages within a section and allow that to update to the server. This
will happen since each section is stored as a .one file and each .one
contains the pages of that section. The server will interpret the delete
action the same as modifying a file with new text, its just an update to the
file and it will allow it to update on the server.

 

[CJ]

Well, here is something interesting to add... I found out today that we can
still delete the sections even if they are NOT unlocked. How can I stop this
from happening? Surely locking a section prevents it from being deleted??

~CJ

 

[Ilya Koulchin]

Well, here is something interesting to add... I found out today that we can
still delete the sections even if they are NOT unlocked. How can I stop this
from happening? Surely locking a section prevents it from being deleted??

You cannot prevent people from deleting password protected sections.
Think of it this way:
Sections are just files in the file system, and the file system doesn't
know that a file is password protected - all it knows is it has a bunch
of data with a name, and it's supposed to ask OneNote if the user tries
to open it. So if you ask it to delete the file, it will still do so.
Yes, OneNote could check if the section is protected and prevent the
user from deleting it within OneNote, but it can't prevent users from
deleting files in the file system. So in the end we decided that it'd be
too confusing if OneNote blocked deletes of password protected sections,
and wouldn't really give us any benefit either.

If you really don't want people to delete files you can configure the
notebook folder permissions in Windows accordingly, but that still would
not prevent people from deleting all the pages in a section, or all the
content on the page, and so on.

Ilya