Locked Out of SharePoint Site

Question

A recent SharePoint Administrator who is no longer with my Company created a "Test" SharePoint Site with only himself having Full Control Permissions on the site, with everyone else having Read rights. We are currently trying to Delete this site, as well as many others that we are currently locked out of.

As a Full Control Admin / Collection Admin on the entirety of our SharePoint environment, how can I delete these un-needed sites?

*We are using SharePoint Online (I initially believed it was 2016)

Any assistance is greatly appreciated. Cheers!

Answer 1

You need Site Collection Admin or above rights to do this. These permissions can be granted in the site permissions at the top level site. Alternatively they can be granted in Central Administration (see image). Or Full Control can be added to the web application in CA as well.

Individual content owners will not be able to do this unless the exiting user utilized a SharePoint Group to administer sites an you could be placed in that group.

Answer 2

Follow the steps:

• Login to central admin using Farm account.
• under Application Management, look for Delete a Site Collection.
• Select the right web application, this will show all the site collections within web application.
• Select the site collection and delete it.

Answer 3

By default, site collection administrator has full control to the site. You could login to this site with a site collection administrator account then delete the site.