Sunday, April 26, 2015

Requesting site access in SharePoint 2013

Let me introduce you to the Access Request and Invitations feature that allows you to manage access requests to your sites in SharePoint 2013. All users without access to a particular site on SharePoint will be prompted with this message

"Sorry, this site hasn't been shared with you".

Now, how do you share the site then? Or how does a user request for access to the site?

By Enabling Access Requests!

Firstly, enable Access Requests, and to do that you need to enable Outgoing e-mail settings. Navigate to the Central Administration, under System Settings / Configure outgoing e-mail settings.

Once this is enabled your users will instead see something else instead of a "Sorry, ......" message, which is:

Let us know why you need access to this site

The user requesting access needs to provide a reason and click Send Request. The site admin will be notified via e-mail and the user's request is saved in the site.

To provide site Access

The site administrator can click on Site Settings (the cog wheel) / Shared With... to see the current Sharing status. If there are pending access requests, the admin will see a notification. You can click on View Requests.


The administrations will see all pending access requests in a list where they can see who wants access to which site and by clicking the ellipsis (the … ) they can see status of a specific request.

The admin can approve or decline the request or initiate a communication with the user requesting. If you type a message to the requester, it will show up in the same page which the user requested in the first place.

Site admins can also go to Site Settings / Access requests and invitations.

You can also access the Access Request hidden SharePoint List using the below URLs:

Guest user invitations - Access Requests/pendinginv.aspx
History - Access Requests/oldreq.aspx
Pending Requests - Access Requests/pendingreq.aspx

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