SharePoint 2013 – Manipulating the Term Store from a Feature event receiver

When manipulating the Term Store in SharePoint 2013, such as adding new groups or term sets, you might receive an “System.UnauthorizedAccessException: The current user has insufficient permissions to perform this operation.” error.  You can get this error, even if your user account is a Term Store administrator, when trying make those changes within a feature’s event receiver and then activating those features directly, or via an ONet.xml reference, from PowerShell.

It seems that this isn’t really a TermStore application rights issue, but instead is the SharePoint execution privileges stopping things. When you activate the feature from the front end website (site settings) it would work fine as it seems that this page automatically calls RunWithElevatedPrivileges around any feature activation.  Activating via PowerShell don’t have this call automatically, and so you might need to add this call directly into your feature event receiver.

After that, activating the feature from the web or from PowerShell will run your Term Store create code elevated and should work fine.

(PowerShell cmdlet’s don’t manifest elevation issues like this)

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