Whoops, turns out I spoke too soon when I indicated yesterday that my groups-related posts were over ... there's still gold in them thar hills! This fact was brought home to me when I realized that, since I had created my test group on our corporate portal (as opposed to in a test area or in my My Site), it was now showing up as a "real" group in the Quick Launch on our portal. Which discovery naturally led to the question, "OK, I've created a group, now how the heck do I delete it?"
In the process of finding out how to delete my test group, I also realized that there's plenty of valuable information in terms of the care and feeding of a group that lurks within the group dropdown menus. Taking them from left to right, these options are included "under" the New, Actions, and Settings buttons on the dedicated People and Groups page for each group:
The dropdown options under the New button include Add Users and Add Group. Note, however that Add Users here doesn't mean add users to the group in question, but to the site in which the group exists. As well, New Group allows you to add a new group to the site:
The Actions button is where we get into the ability to directly interact with group members, and with the membership of the group whose page you're looking at. As you can see, the options here include: E-mail users, Call/Message Selected Users, and Remove Users from Group:
Those references to selected users are important. Via the checkbox associated with each member of the group, you'll need to manually select the user (or users) in the group that you wish to interact with in the manner selected, like so:
The final set of options, and the one which includes the ability to delete a group, are found in the Settings dropdown menu:
The first option, Group Settings, is largely a duplicate of the New Group creation screen, albeit filled in with all of your previously chosen settings ... and now including the elusive Delete button, which is found at the bottom right, just beneath the group permissions:
The View Group Permissions button will spawn a popup which explains that you should, "Use this page to view the permission assignments that this SharePoint group has in this site collection. In addition to the listed URLs, this group has access to any sites, lists, or items that inherit permissions from these URLs."
The Edit Group Quick Launch will render a page which will enable you to change which groups appear in the Quick Launch on the People and Groups page. It was seeing my test group among the "real" groups in the Quick Launch that set me on the path to discover how to delete the group.
Finally, the Set up Groups option will render a page which allows you to specify who can access your site, and also allows you to either create new groups on the fly or to use preexisting groups:
Funny how looking for one simple thing (e.g., how to delete a group) in SharePoint so often leads to a whole bunch of worthwhile new information, eh?
Posted
Nov 21 2008, 12:04 PM
by
John Anderson
John Anderson is new to both Bamboo Solutions and to SharePoint, but he isn't new to online community. Having recently departed AOL, where he was a Programming Manager for that company's social media team, John is thrilled to have joined the Bamboo family as Manager of Content & Syndication. As a member of the Online Operations team, John takes great pride in helping shape the creation and direction of Bamboo Nation, our nascent SharePoint community. Within Bamboo Nation, John writes the blog SharePoint Blank, in which he (always candidly, sometimes humorously, and even occasionally informatively) documents his daily progress in learning SharePoint. John is also profoundly uncomfortable writing about himself in the third person and is going to stop now.