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“Access Denied”

Every so often I receive a helpdesk call from a user who, although their account is a member of the SharePoint site’s Owners, Members or Visitors group, is still presented with the generic “Access Denied” page when they attempt to visit the site. After a bit of Googling, I found this post that seemed to […]

Every so often I receive a helpdesk call from a user who, although their account is a member of the SharePoint site’s Owners, Members or Visitors group, is still presented with the generic “Access Denied” page when they attempt to visit the site.

After a bit of Googling, I found this post that seemed to have the answer.

The trick is to flush the user’s access permissions and recreate them. This can be done by:

  1. Remove the user’s account from the SharePoint group.
  2. Add the account into the Site Collection Administrators group (Site Actions > Site Settings > Site collection administrators).
  3. Remove the account from the Site Collection Administrators group.
  4. Add the account back into the original SharePoint group.

Seems to do the trick!

Update: 4 September 2013

If the above fails to work, you can also try completely removing the user’s profile from the Site Collection.

  1. Open an existing group, e.g. Owners. Its web address will be along the lines of http://domain/_layouts/people.aspx?MembershipGroupID=4.
  2. Change the value for the MembershipGroupId parameter to 0.  This should display the People and Groups – All People list.
  3. Locate and delete the troublesome user from the list (Actions > Delete Users from Site Collection).
  4. Add the deleted user back into the necessary group.