Sharepoint 'Access Denied' when uploading files

Question

A sharepoint administrator with 'Full Control' to the sharepoint site (not server administrator) is trying to edit a page and upload a graphic file to http://sharepoint.internal.com/sites/maths/ we are getting "upload failed check your folder permissions" but I can't find any folder called 'sites' on the server. Does anyone have any suggestions where I would change these permissions?

Thanks

Answer 1

It seems like you have a small misunderstanding about how SharePoint works. All of the content within SharePoint is actually stored within the SQL Server database, not on the file system. SharePoint/IIS does some request routing behind the scenes to serve the content when a URL is requested, mapping /sites/maths/ to some location in the database.

Typically in SharePoint, /sites/ is what is called a "managed path" - basically meaning that anything under that URL will be handled by SharePoint and not by IIS. In your case, underneath the /sites/ path there is a site called maths.

It isn't possible to upload a file to a site within SharePoint - you need to upload to a list. Even though this user may have full control on the /maths/ site, there is the possibility that the list has more restricted permissions that don't give them access to add content.

You need to take a look at the list where the upload is occurring and make sure the proper permissions exist on that.