SharePoint 2013 Site Owner cannot manage Access Requests (Updated)

I have been pulling my limited hair out for a week trying to figure out why a Site Owner will Full Control on the site would always get denied when they tried to respond to Access Requests. When they received the email and clicked on "Accept or decline this request" which goes to https://[siteurl]/Access Requests/pendingreq.aspx they would get "Sorry, this site hasn't been shared with you."

Preliminary Troubleshooting Steps

I went through each and every permission group on the site to make sure the Site Owner group was the owner of the group. I went through each list or library that had broken site permissions and made sure the Site Owners group had Full Control of those as well. They all did.

Then I looked at the Permission Level of the Site Owner's group. It said Full Control, but it also had that awful "Limited Access" permission. This site had many owners and many times they all tried their best to limit access to certain things and I got calls all the time about problems. I wasn't surprised to see yet another issue.

The Fix

As it turns out, the Access Requests page is actually part of a hidden list in SharePoint. I knew at that point, I just had to restore Site Owner's permissions back into this list it had somehow been removed from. A bit of searching and it turns out Microsoft had a KB article with just the fix for SharePoint Online. It also works for SharePoint On-Premise. Below are the steps I took:


Update - Easily Fix this issue with SharePoint Designer

An Anonymous comment to this post pointed out that SharePoint Designer can show you most of the item you need below. In fact, it it will save you a lot of time as the steps to find the list ID were time consuming. I will leave those instructions below, but here is the simple way to address the issue with SharePoint Designer.

  1. Open your site with SharePoint Designer.
  2. Right-click on Access Requests in All Files in the Site Objects Navigation and choose Properties.
  3. Under Customization, click the Permissions for this list hyperlink. This will open your browser to the Access Request list permissions. (Note: You may need to initially select Preview in Browser in the SharePoint Designer ribbon to select an alternate browser. Selecting this link on my system tried to open Microsoft Edge, which immediately crashed. Your mileage may vary.)
  4. Make the necessary changes to the permissions for the list to enable users other than those who are members of the Site Owners group to make changes to the Access Requests list

You may also need to perform the following steps to allow the Site Owner to respond to the requests.


The solution was to re-run the original permissions setup of the site, and specify the new Site Owners group as the Owners of the site. To get there, construct a URL like this:
https://<URL<URL of affected site or site collection>/[Path-To-Site]/_layouts/15/permsetup.aspx

This will open up the groups for the site. Click OK.

Once you've re-defined the default owners group in PermSetup.aspx, your new Site Owners group will be able to manage access requests.


The old way using only a browser

Note: I originally wrote this post in 2014 using Internet Explorer. You may also use Microsoft Edge Developer Tools or Chrome Developer Tools, but I have not included those instructions below.
  1. As a user who has the Manage Permissions Permission Level on the affected site and who also has access to the Access Requests list (for example, a Site Collection administrator), browse to the Access Requests list in Internet Explorer.
  2. Press F12 to open the F12 developer tools in Internet Explorer.
  3. Click the Network tab in the Developer Tools window, and then press F5 to enable network traffic capturing.
  4. Refresh the Access Requests page in Internet Explorer. After the page has loaded, press Shift+F5 to stop capturing network traffic.
  5. In the Developer Tools window, double-click the first result in the URL list. This URL will end with "pendingreq.aspx."
  6. In the Developer Tools window, click Request body.
  7. In the search box, type pagelistid: and then press Enter.
  8. The search will highlight the pageListId text. Following this text, copy the GUID after pageListId:. The GUID will be inside an opening { brace character and a closing } brace character as follows: {GUID}

    Include the opening and closing brace character when you copy the GUID. This GUID is the identifier for the SharePoint Online Access Requests list for your organization.
  9. In the browser address bar, enter https://<URL<URL of affected site or site collection>/_layouts/15/ListEdit.aspx?List=<{GUID}>, and then press Enter.

    Note The <URL of affected site or site collection> placeholder represents the URL for the site collection where you are trying to change the access requests—for example, https://contoso.sharepoint.com. And <{GUID}> represents the GUID that you copied in step 8.
  10. On the Settings page, click Permissions for this list.
  11. Make the necessary changes to the permissions for the list to enable users other than those who are members of the Site Owners group to make changes to the Access Requests list.

Popular posts from this blog

How to change the owner of PowerApps

Image
I have seen many blog posts and videos about how to change the owner of a PowerApp. The problem is that all the blogs posts out there (as of 4/21/2020) don't tell you how to change the owner to someone other than the Global Administrator running these commands. Some blogs just tell you there is a command which is supremely unhelpful. So I plan to fix that. Q: Why would you change it? A: In case someone created an app that left the company you want to transfer it. Or perhaps you created the app and you want to transfer ownership of it to a Service Account that will live beyond you. Q: Why not just use the Export/Import process? A: You can, but that is not the point of this article. What you need 1) An Office 365 Global Administrator account and access to Azure Active Directory users portal 2) The App ID and Environment ID (more below) 3) PowerShell Get the details 1) In a browser, login to admin.powerapps.com as a Global Administrator 2) In the Environme
Read more

Unknown server tag 'AdminControls:MigrationToolPromotionTip'.

Image
I was applying the August 2019 CU for SharePoint 2013 in my Test environment. After installing the binaries, I tried to go to Central Administration to view the Servers in Farm page to verify the status. Instead of loading the homepage, I got the error message Unknown server tag 'AdminControls:MigrationToolPromotionTip'. I was able to get to other pages within Central Admin by typing in the URL directly. After successfully completing the Products and Configuration Wizard (which you should do after every patch), Central Administration loaded successfully. I then noticed a new advertising banner touting their SharePoint Migration tool. Not a coincidence.
Read more