Ulysses Ludwig’Blog

Problem

We want to make an anonymous suggestion box. "Anonymous" in this case meaning "nobody knows who posted this" - we do not want to allow anonymous access to SharePoint from a security standpoint - we just want to obscure the name of the poster. First thought is to delete the Created-By column, but SharePoint will not allow it. You could hide the column from all views, but that isn’t really secure. If you’re going to tell the people at your company that this suggestion box is anonymous, it had better be truly anonymous.

Solution

We use a second list and a workflow to obscure the user who posted the suggestion, making it truly anonymous with no need to allow access to users who are not logged in.

First create the front end suggestion list. Name this "Anonymous Suggestion Box". The only column we really need is title, but we’ll add a Body column here as well.

Set the permissions on this list such that anyone can contribute. Under Advanced Settings, only let users see their own entries.

Create an AD user SP-Anonymous. Add SP-Anonymous as a Site Collection Administrator on any site collections that will have anonymous lists.

Create a second list, "Read Suggestions", with identical columns to the first. Set permissions such that only the people in that department and SP-Anonymous can read/edit. Make sure this list has no general read access.

Open SharePoint Designer 2010, login as SP-Anonymous, and create a new workflow for the "Anonymous Suggestion Box" list called "Anonymize".

Create an impersonation step.

Create an action to copy the current item into "Read Suggestions", mapping each column.

Create a second action to delete the current item.

Set the workflow to start when an item is added or modified.

And publish.

Now test it.

Nobody knows who posted this.

Creating an Anonymous Suggestion Box in SharePoint 2010 By Aaron Caldwell, 10.0 out of 10 based on 3 ratings