Best way to restrict access to documents (outside of the group or library level)

Question

Hi, we're thinking of implementing SharePoint Server 2013 Standard Edition for our organization. Many of our employees are research scientists working on proprietary information. From the (admittedly little) I understand about SharePoint, if a user wants
to restrict access to a particular document to the 2 or 3 people with whom they're collaborating (and also have it not appear in the search results), they will have to email their power user to request that a new document library be created in which they can
store their documents. Is that correct? In this case, what is the best way to handle item-level permissions? Users absolutely want to have the freedom to restrict access to their documents themselves rather than being forced to go to their power user. Thanks.

Answer 1

Hi,
Per my knowledge, if you want to restrict access to the documents to some users, then you need to have Manage Permissions permission to modify other users’ permission on the documents.
If you do not have the Manage Permissions permission, I recommend to ask the site administrator to create a workflow as below to remove the corresponding users’ permission on the documents which you uploaded. You can start the workflow on the document you
upload and then the permission of the users set on the workflow will be removed from the document.
Best regards.
Thanks
Victoria Xia
TechNet Community Support