SharePoint Access Denied

Question

Hi,

Two (2) months ago, my team and I made a SharePoint site for our team so that other people in our organization can access our documents (they are set to Restricted Mode), Events, Newsletters, etc. Initially other people in our organization were able to access our site and documents with no problem at all. They could freely visit the site. But suddenly a few days ago, one person from our organization said that when they tried to access our site, an "access denied" page specifically saying that "x does not have permissions to access this resource" and barred them access from the our team's site which didn't happen before. I tried to contact several other people from our organization and it turns out all of them experienced the same thing save for my team and I since we were set as Owners of the site.

I tried finding solutions online but to no avail and configuring the site permissions settings. How can I remove the need for any user from our organization to request approval before they can access our site? Our goal is to make the site accessible to anyone in our organization, but have restricted access to our documents.

Note: The people in our organization already have 0365 accounts so I don't get why they were denied access.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Hi,

Thank you for posting in our community.

Since you mentioned ‘’Our goal is to make the site accessible to anyone in our organization, but have restricted access to our documents.”, I would suggest you to follow these steps to grant permission to your user again.

1.         On the SharePoint site Home page, click the gear.

2.         Click Site Permissions, and then Advanced Site Permissions.

3.         Click Grant Permissions button to open the Share dialog and then Invite people.

4.         Type Everyone except external users and then click Show Options, select the permission level to Visitors group.

5.         Click Share and then all users in your organization will receive the invite email.

6.         Ask them to access the site by this link.

Moreover, if your idea of “Restricted Mode” is to restricted access to your documents, I would suggest you set specific Permissions levels on the related Document Library page.

For example, to set unique permission for a Document Library,

1.         Click the gear then Library settings> Permissions for this document library.

2.         Click the Stop Inheriting Permissions button.

3.         Select all existing users and click the Remove User Permissions button

4.         And now you could grant permission to specific users by clicking the Grant Permissions button.

If you need further help, feel free to contact us.

Best Regards,

May

Answer 2

Hi, May Shi

Thank you for your response. I acknowledge the resolution you presented for our "access denied" issue. However, when I visit the SharePoint sites of the other teams in our organization, we can freely access them without them needing to send us an e-mail invite beforehand to access the site and their sites never prompted an "access denied" page at all. Is there a particular setting that we need to toggle so that access requests or e-mail invites won't be needed at all? Other users in our org were already able to access our site before with ease. So we are not sure what we might have done to trigger the access request prompt.

Please let me know if I need to provide screenshots so that I can further help clarify our situation. 

Thank you!

Answer 3

Hi,

As you mentioned you could visit the SharePoint sites of other teams in your organization, you may be in these sites member group. Since the site member may be set to Everyone except external users by default in most sites. To check this, go to sits settings> People and groups and see whether the site member named Everyone except external users.

However, you may set up your site to break the permission and to meet your needs. So, I would suggest you grant this permission again. Since the methods in my previous reply may be a quick and easy way to meet your needs. And all of the users in your organization will receive the welcome email to inform they have joined your sites. They are not required to access your site in this way, they could also access your sites by URL. But just to quickly access the site to confirm whether the issue is fixed. I’d suggest you let the users access your site by email.

For your information:Permission levels in SharePoint

Best Regards,

May