SharePoint 2010: How to Give Yourself Access

Today, I was asked to change some user permissions on a site. I was a domain admin but had no other privileges that would help me along the way. Importantly, this meant I didn’t have the permissions needed to change some user permissions on the site.

How did I get said permissions?

I changed the password on the account of someone who DID have permissions and used that account. Lame, I know. I didn’t really do much troubleshooting, either, but this was a quick solution.

UPDATE: This looks a bit more proper. I haven’t read through it, but it seems relevant.

http://blog.falchionconsulting.com/index.php/2007/09/add-site-administrator/

UPDATE 2: With much thanks to the above link:

IF:

- You have access to a SharePoint Farm’s Central Administration console

AND:

- You do NOT have permissions on a given site but NEED such permissions

The SOLUTION is:

- Application Management, Site Collections, Manage Site Collection Administrators

- Add yourself as either the primary or secondary site administrator

There is no way to simply grant yourself fine-grained permissions- you’ve got to make yourself one of “The” administrators of the site, and you can only have two such administrators.