Exception calling "CreateDefaultAssociatedGroups" with 3 arguments: Access denied

Question

Goal: Use PowerShell to create the default permissions groups (Owners, Visitors, Members) after site collection being created with PowerShell.

I Logged into the Application server with a farm admin account, running PowerShell as admin:

$web = Get-SPWeb $siteCollectionUrl    
$web.CreateDefaultAssociatedGroups("DOMAIN\sitecollectionadmin", "", "")

I am getting below result:

Exception calling "CreateDefaultAssociatedGroups" with "3" argument(s): "Access is denied. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070005 (E_ACCESSDENIED))"

Is there any specific permission I need to grant the account that I am using to run PowerShell so I don't get the Access denied error?

Answer 1

This could be a few things:

1. User isn't a local administrator on the server
2. User isn't a farm admin
3. (Most likely) user doesn't have full control on the Web App policy (this would generally be preferred for ease of administration versus assigning the account as a Site Collection Admin)