Securing a Share
Although the entire point of creating a share is to allow users on your network to access the resources contained within the share, you still have to be careful about what level of access the users are given to those resources. For example, suppose that your human resources department has created a spreadsheet that lists the salary information for every employee in your company. Now suppose that everybody in human resources needs to be able to access the spreadsheet, and to make updates to it. Since the finance department is responsible for printing paychecks, they need to have access to the spreadsheet too, but you probably do not want them to be making any changes to it. Given the sensitive nature of the information in the spreadsheet, you probably would not want anyone else in the company to have access to it. With that in mind, let us take a look at how this type of security could be implemented.
The first thing that you need to understand about the share that you have created, is that there are two different types of security that you can apply to it. You have a choice of using share level security, file level security, or both.
Share level security applies directly to the share point that you have created. When the users connect to the SharePoint to access the files, the share level permissions that you have set are applied. In contrast, file level permissions are applied directly to files and folders rather than to the share.
The reason why there are two different types of permissions has a little bit to do with the evolution of Windows. The Windows operating system supports two different hard drive formats; FAT and NTFS. FAT is a legacy file system that has been around since the early 1980s. Because of its age, FAT is a no-frills file system, and does not support file level security. NTFS on the other hand, was designed with security in mind. You can apply file level security directly to files and folders residing on an NTFS volume.
Since the FAT file system does not support file level security, Microsoft allows you to use share level security as a way of getting around the file system shortcomings. Today the NTFS file system is used almost exclusively, and the FAT file system is all but extinct. You can still use share level permissions if you want to, but it is usually considered to be better practice to use file level permissions instead.
So what makes file level permissions so much better than share lev
