Site Collection administrator is getting Access Denied error message when editing Page Layout and Site Template Settings

Question

I have an account in Office 365/SharePoint Online and I am creating a new Site Collection with the Template Publishing Portal.

I want to be able to add all kinds of different subsite templates below the Publishing Portal so I go into the Page Layout and Site Template Settings of the Site Collection and try to add the templates for the subsites.

Whenever I am trying to save the changes I keep getting error message:

What is the proper permission to do this change?

Answer 1

After support from Microsoft had a look, we found that the issue was caused by the fact that the Custom Script was not activated for the Site Collection. In case you are experiencing similar issue in the future, you can use the following steps to resolve it:

• Open PowerShell as Admin
• Type in Connect-SPOService "https://-admin.sharepoint.com" -credential "admin full email address"
• Type in Set-SPOsite "SiteURL" -DenyAddAndCustomizePages 0

Additionally this may resolve any issues you might have with connecting via SharePoint Designer, as this has the same culprit. After changing the value for DenyAddAndCustomizePages both issues go away.

If you want to check the configuration value for any site collection you can use the following command, after connecting with Connect-SPOService as described above:

• Get-SPOSite "SiteUrl" |fl

Answer 2

This depends on the permission levels settings. Default it would be Full Control, I guess, but you could make your own custom group and apply this level permission to it (that is, if you have the permission to do this).