Ton Stegeman [MVP] weblog

When I was preparing for beta exam 70–541 I studied all items in the preparation guide. The last item confused me a bit. You should know how to “Add a cross-site group to a site group on different site”. I am confused, because I thought cross site groups no longer existed (or all SharePoint groups are considered to be cross site). The beta exam however, had a few questions about this subject. This made me a bit curious how this works in SharePoint 2007, so I started to look into it. But now I am even more confused…..

If you look at the object model, a SPWeb object has 2 properties:

• Groups – this returns all cross site groups for the site (according to the SDK)
• SiteGroups – this returns all cross site groups for the site collection.

I created a testprogram that saves the Xml of these groups to a file to compare the differences between the 2.

• Both properties return the same groups in the document center in a new portal
• When I create a new group (using the UI) in the document center, it shows up in SiteGroups.
• When I use “Set Up Groups” in the document center People and Groups to create a new group, it also shows up in SiteGroups.
• When I setup the document center to have unique permissions and create a new group, it shows up both in Groups and in SiteGroups.

I is not very clear to me what exactly the difference is between cross site groups for a site and cross site groups for a site collection. In the SharePoint UI there appears to be no difference. Anyone who knows how this works?

And if you are also preparing for the exam, this blog by Ishai Sagi contains more usefull information.