Symptoms
When copying a list or library from SharePoint 2003 with its permissions, the membership of groups with custom permissions may differ from the source.
Note: As of November 2021, ShareGate is no longer able to provide full support for SharePoint Server 2003 and 2007, which are past the end of their Microsoft support lifetime. For more information, see Contacting our technical support team.
Details
Due to differences in the way SharePoint 2003 handles group permissions, ShareGate Migrate is unable to migrate lists or libraries with groups that contain custom membership at the sub-site level. It will instead copy the group's membership at the site collection level. Users that have been added to that core group will have to be re-added and given the correct permissions at the destination after the migration. However, all other permissions granted at the source are preserved.
In SharePoint 2003, it is possible to create a group in a site collection and then modify the members of that group on a per- sub-site basis. The concept of permission levels also does not exist in this version of SharePoint, the specific set of permissions are instead granted to the group. As of SharePoint 2007, this has been changed and it is now impossible to modify the members of a group at the subsite level, as the group's members are now defined at the site collection level only.
To try and bridge this major behavioral difference between SharePoint 2003 and more recent versions, ShareGate Migrate creates a permission level with the same name as the group and the same permissions are granted to each member of the group at the site collection level. As it is impossible to redefine members for a specific subsite, the members will be granted the permission level matching the group's permissions for every subsite.
This issue occurs when ShareGate Migrate migrates a SharePoint 2003 list or library with permission granted to a group whose membership differs from its membership at the site collection level. To replicate the permission settings at the destination, ShareGate Migrate will break the inheritance and set the permissions to match the source which means the user permissions will be removed and permission for the group will be added. However, new members of this subsite won't be in the group and they won't have any permissions on the list.