When you are invited to a SharePoint site, you will be able to interact with the site on different lists, libraries, documents and items, which are based on your role in relationship to that site with the list.

There are 5 primary roles which are built into SharePoint

  • Owner
    Owner has full control of the site, otherwise on the libraries, they can do whatever they want.

  • Designer
    Designer permissions are a little more limited, they can view, delete, update, add and most importantly they can customize the things given to them.

  • Editor
    Editors have the permissions to work with the items, which are found in the site, but they don’t have the permission to customise the site design.

  • Contributor
    The contributors even have more limited permission, because when the editors have an ability to delete the items from the site, the contributors generally only have the permissions to delete the items, which are created themselves.

  • Readers
    The readers have an ability to look at any item. They might even have an ability to download the document and edit but not to save it. They can save the changes only on the desktop or on their local machines.

Thus, these are the five primary inbuilt roles in SharePoint. We might have different roles on different SharePoint sites or you might have different roles with in a SharePoint site.

In SharePoint, the roles can be established at the highest level, at the level of site collection.

A site collection is nothing but a whole collection of sites in one container.


We can have a set of roles that are assigned at site collection level or at the individual team site.

We can have different roles, which are based on specific apps within a site's library or list.

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