Access Denied When Uploading a File in SharePoint 2010

I recently came across a situation in SharePoint 2010 where an individual with Owner access to a site was getting an “Access Denied” message each time they attempted to upload a document into one of the site’s libraries. The issue wasn’t related to lacking permissions, as the user could still manage the list and edit existing items.

How to Solve the Issue

Upon further investigation, I found other articles online indicating that it was related to the “Content Organizer” feature being activated, and that the resolution was to disable it. However, in this situation, the “Content Organizer” was a necessary feature. I started digging into the components that make up the “Content Organizer” feature and noticed that there were unique permissions assigned to the Drop Off Library on this particular site, and the Owners group did not have permission to it.

The resolution is to make sure that users have Contribute access to a site’s Drop Off Library, if they need to be able to upload documents into other libraries on the site. This was a bit of surprising behavior, as in this case, the Drop Off Library was only being used with the Official File Web Service, where the Record Center Web Service Submitter account was the only one who would be uploading files to the Drop Off Library.

Cheers,
Matt