Enabling Anonymous Contributions to a SharePoint List

Cross-posted from EndUserSharePoint.com…

If you are using WSS or MOSS for a public-facing site, you may want to allow people to post content in a limited way. A great example of this is where you want to have a Contact Us form on your site. If you have serious concerns about security, then this article is probably not a good answer. If you are a small business or organization that wants to use WSS for a public-facing site, then this is a great tip for you.

Let’s assume that you already have a site set up which allows anonymous access (and that all of your licensing is in order to do so). Set up a Custom List that contains the columns you want to collect; let’s call it Contact Us. Here’s an example:

This renders a form that looks something like this:

(I’ve done a little light branding on this one, so yours will look a teeny bit different.)

Now go into the List Settings for Contact Us:

(My custom branding again, and, no, it isn’t a Christmas store.)

Now go to Permissions for this list:

Then under Actions, choose Edit Permissions. This will “break” the inheritance of permissions from the containing site, allowing you to customize the permissions for just this list.

Agree to the warning message:

Now under the newly exposed Settings menu option, choose Anonymous Access:

Finally we can set the anonymous permissions how we’d like them. In the case of a Contact Us form, you’ll probably want to let people add items, but nothing else (you get View Items when you check Add Items):

Now you can embed a form into your Contact Us page for this list, and anyone, authenticated or not, can create items. If you want to monitor the list, you can either set a simple alert on it or create a SharePoint Designer-based workflow to send out customized emails with the item contents embedded in them.