SharePoint Survey Permissions Part: 1 - Respond to a survey but do not edit site content
Part 2, which covers permissions for anonymous users, can be found here.
Surveys are a nice feature of SharePoint, however their security is not the easiest to understand. I thought it was just me who didn’t take to it straight away, but seeing Veronique’s post on Information Worker made me think it’s not just me. So for this post, I’ll answer her question—summarized as: "How do you enable a user to respond to a survey but not edit the site (the survey sits in) content?"
First off, we need a survey:
Creating a new survey.
On the settings, you need to click the permissions for the survey:
The survey settings page.
On the list permission settings, click Actions → Edit Permissions. At this point, you’ll be asked to confirm whether you want to create unique permissions for the survey (short: it will no longer inherit from its parent security permissions in the future).
Actions → Edit Permissions on the survey permissions.
The confirmation prompt.
For my example survey, I’m assuming you want to allow all logged-in users to complete it. So, find the NT AUTHORITY\AUTHENTICATED USERS group, click on it, and ensure they have Contribute permissions, then click OK. Now return to the survey settings page.
The user listing.
Managing user permissions.
Now, click Advanced settings on the settings page.
The settings page.
The Advanced settings page lets you configure who can view responses and what they can edit. Note: Edit here means changing their votes after submission—not editing the survey or website. The Contribute permission already allows them to add (submit) votes.
Advanced survey settings.
Once done, users should be able to complete the survey—but because the list/survey has unique permissions, they won’t be able to edit the site hosting it.