Presentation Services Access Denied Issue

During migration or copying of presentation web catalogs, some will no doubt come across this error for users when they log in:

access denied for user to path/users/{username}/_portal/dashboard layout

What this generally is saying is that the user does not have access to their dashboard or any dashboard.  They could type ‘answers’ after the ‘?’ in the URL and be able to access answers, if they have that privilege.  Pretty much what happened is that the migration/copy of the web catalog user folder did not copy the users’ permissions correct.

If you want, you could open the source web catalog that was copied and the web catalog that has the issue via cat manager and see the permissions for that user folder for each web catalog.  You should see that the permissions are different.

Now to fix the issue.  It is pretty simple, open cat manager and set permissions for the user’s folder to that user.  So the user needs at least ‘Change/Delete’ permissions on that folder and have this permission set recursively to sub-items and sub-folders.

And that should fix it.