Enabling Anonymous Contributions to a SharePoint List
Author: Marc D. Anderson
http://mdasblog.wordpress.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 just set a simple alert on it.
Author: Marc D. Anderson
http://mdasblog.wordpress.com
Marc D. Anderson is a Co-Founder and the President of Sympraxis Consulting LLC, based in Newton, MA. He has over 25 years of experience as a technology consultant and line manager across a wide spectrum of industries and organizational sizes. Marc has done extensive consulting on knowledge management and collaboration and what makes them actually work in practice. Marc is a very frequent “answerer” on the MSDN SharePoint – Design and Customization forum.
Without some custom coding 2007 will not execute a workflow when the change is made by anonymous user. Workflows execute under the context of the current user and anonymous users do not have one.
Doh! You’re right, Will. I’ll amend that statement above.
M.
Hi Marc,
You mention “without custom coding” to initiate a workflow after an Anonymous user makes a change. This is exactly what I need. In fact I am using a list for exactly the purpose you mention. Can you point me in the right direction to the code which can achieve this?
Many thanks,
Paul.
Paul:
Actually, Paul, as Will points out above, workflows won’t fire for anonymous users. I took anything that I said about that out of the article back in March after Will pointed it out.
M.
Marc, could you elaborate on “If you have serious concerns about security, then this article is probably not a good answer.”? What would be the security threats from enabling anonymous access to a single list?
Christope,
You may want to take a look at http://furuknap.blogspot.com/2009/09/want-to-use-sharepoint-as-your-public.html to learn more about some of the dangers you face.
SharePoint security is a highly complex issue. The ease with which organizations can implement SharePoint is a dual-edged nuclear warhead. It’s easy to get up and running and similarly easy to blow up parts of a continent and expose sensitive data.
Out-of-the-box, SharePoint sites are not secure.
.b
Thanks for the link Bjørn!
I’ve had people tell me that WSS “isn’t secure”. I’ll let others weigh in on why because frankly, I don’t know the reason for the statement. It’s possible that it’s a SharePoint Myth.
M.
I has Created an new Form(By Via UserControl) with some field to user Anonymous add item to my custom list Sharepoint. But when User Anonymous submit my Form within attach file then appear Form Login . How can i solve this problem?
Tuan:
I’m not sure I understand your question. Why don’t you post to Stump the Panel with more details about your situation and we’ll see if we can get it sorted out for you.
M.
When I check “Add Items” it doesn’t stick. I save the change, then reopen, and Add Items is unchecked again.
Pop
Lynn:
I’m not sure what’s going on here. The setting certainly ought to ’stick” unless you’ve got something in place to prevent it.
M.
My next idea is the “ViewFormPagesLockDown” feature mentioned here.
http://kwizcom.blogspot.com/2007/06/anonymous-users-cannot-access-list.html
My top site is a publishing site, so it may be the problem. Unfortunately, it may take years to get the feature disabled so I can test.