Enable anonymous access to a SharePoint site

If you done with developing your SharePoint based website and you would like to make your site or part of it available to everyone in your organization or available via Internet you have reached the right place. I would like to note that Anonymous Access is not for everyone and needs to be planned out carefully.

1.)   Navigate to SharePoint 2010 Central Administration -> Application management -> Manage web applications.

2.)   Choose the web application you would like to configure and click onAuthentication Providers.

3.)   Click on Default

4.) On the Edit Authentication screen choose the Enable anonymous accessoption and click on save.

5.) Our next step is to open your SharePoint site -> Site Actions -> Site Permissions

6.) Click on Anonymous Access

7.) Specify which parts of your web site you would like to enable anonymous access for and click on OK.

8.) Notice that a new entry was added to the list of permissions

9.) Navigate to Site Actions -> Site Settings

10.) Navigate to Galleries -> Master Pages and page layouts

11.) Click on the library tab

12.) Click on Library Permissions

13.) Click on Anonymous Access

14.) Specify the permission level of anonymous users. In our case we would like anonymous users to be able to view items.

15.) Navigate to Site Actions –> View All Site Content

16.) Click on Style Library and repeat the actions in steps 11 – 14.

17.) That’s it! Now we can test our configuration. Sign out of your web site, close your browser and then reopen.

If we see the “Sign In” button on the top of the screen that means our configuration is correct and we can access the site anonymously. :)