Sign up ×  We have a unique requirement where customer wants
their authors to browse the publishing site as-if they are read-
only users. Additional Notes:    1. We do NOT have separate
STAGING and PRODUCTION farms. It should happen in the same farm
and same site collection.   2. Authors do NOT want to use a
separate account to browse the site. They want to switch the
mode (reader-author) dynamically  Leave comments if more
information is needed to understand/answer the question.
share|improve this question  2 Answers 2  One thing is for sure,
as Erica said, there is not OOTB way of handling it.  I have an
alternative solution but not sure if it will scale to your
situation.  We can develop a HttpModule to keep track of request
from each user and read their choice flag (whether they want to
be an author or reader) from the User Profiles properties.
Depending on the flag value in profile properties users can
switch the mode (reader-author) dynamically via help from SP
Groups.  How to set/save the flag value? W