How to: Change SharePoint Default Permissions Group

SharePoint Default Permission Groups 101

After creating a new SharePoint Online site (aka Site Collection) several permissions groups are automatically created for you to help you manage permissions for the given SharePoint site.

By default, the following default permissions groups are created for you:

SharePoint Group	Default Permissions Level
<site name> Members	Edit
<site name> Owners	Full Control
<site name> Visitors	Read

These default groups are visible through the SITE PERMISSIONS menu (as pictured below):

What The?

The other day while trying to add a user to one of these default permissions groups, I noticed that I could not locate the groups i.e. there was no group prefixed with the site name.

Hmmm … what is going on here!?!

Solution

This confused me a little until I realised that someone had previously changed the default groups associated with the given SharePoint Online site to instead use a set of custom groups.

How do you do this?

You can access the Default SharePoint Group configuration screen at the below URL. You can view and change the default groups as needed.

<SP Site URL>/_layouts/15/permsetup.aspx

Final Thoughts

Well I hope you’ve learnt something new from this article. SharePoint is a large and complex topic.

There’s always plenty to learn about it!