Site Collection Administrators and Owners

Published: November 1, 2003

Introduction

A site collection is a group of sites built on Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services that all exist under a top-level site. To make managing the sites and their content more convenient, you can assign users to be site collection administrators or site collection owners. These are permission levels to give to users who you want to have full administrative rights to all sites and content within a site collection.

About Site Collection Administrators

Site collection administrators have full rights to all sites within a site collection. They can add or delete sites or change the settings for any site within a site collection. They can view, add, delete, or change all content within those sites as well. They can add and remove users from sites and send invitations to those sites.

You can specify site collection administrators by using the User Information page in SharePoint Site Administration as described in the Giving a User Site Collection Administrator Rights section later in this paper. You can also use the adduser operation with Stsadm.exe as described in the Give a user site collection administrator rights by using Stsadm.exe section later in this paper.

About Site Collection Owners

Site collection owners and secondary owners are also site collection administrators. However, owners and secondary owners are the only users who receive e-mail notifications for events, such as the pending automatic deletion of inactive sites. By default, site collection owners also receive requests for access from users who have been denied access. A user who is a member of the Administrator site group can use the Site Administration pages to change the e-mail address that receives requests for access.

When you create a site collection, Windows SharePoint Services automatically lists you as the site collection owner. Depending on the configuration of the site, you might also be required to specify a secondary owner for the site. You can change a site collection owner or secondary owner by using the Manage Site Collection Owners page in Central Administration or by using the siteowner operation with Stsadm.exe.

Note: If you remove an owner from the Administrator site group for the site, the owner retains the owner flag in the database and can still perform Web site administrative tasks. Follow the steps in the "Changing Site Owners from SharePoint Central Administration" or "Changing Site Owners from the Command Line" sections later in this paper to remove an owner.

Giving a User Site Collection Administrator Rights

You can give site collection administrator rights to any user that has interacted with the site by using the Site Settings page or the command line for Windows SharePoint Services. To perform this task, you must be a site collection administrator, member of the SharePoint administrators group, or a member of the servers local administrators group.

Note: Additionally, you can get a list of the command-line operations by typing stsadm.exe -help on the command line. Syntax help for specific operations is available by typing stsadm.exe -help operation_name .

Make a user a site collection administrator by using the HTML administration pages

1. On a site in the site collection that has the user to whom you want to give site collection administrator rights, click Site Settings.

2. On the Site Settings page, in the Manage My Information section, click View information about site users.

3. Click the name of the user to whom you want to give site collection administrator rights.

   Note: The User Information page displays all users who have interacted with the site. If you don’t see the desired user, ask the user to interact with the site, for example, by creating a new item in a list and then deleting it. After doing so, the users name should appear on the User Information page.

4. Click Edit User Information.

5. Select the Site collection administrator check box.

6. Click Save and Close.

Give a user site collection administrator rights by using Stsadm.exe

1. Determine the URL for the site and the user name, e-mail address, current site group, and display name of the user you want to give site collection administrator rights to.

2. On the server running Windows SharePoint Services, open a command prompt.

3. Change to the directory containing Stsadm.exe using the cd command. For example, using the default path, the command would be:

cd c:\program files\common files\microsoft shared\web server extensions\60\bin

4. Type the following, replacing the italicized text with the correct information:

stsadm.exe -o adduser -url URL -userlogin DOMAIN\User_Name -useremail someone@example.com -role Site_Group_Name -username "Users Display Name" -siteadmin

Retain the quotation marks around the user's display name.

Command Line Parameters for adduser operation

-username

-siteadmin

Changing Site Collection Owners

To perform the following steps, you must be a member of the SharePoint administrators group or a member of the servers local administrators group. You must also know the URL for the site collection for which you will be changing ownership.

Note: Users with site collection administrator rights can also change site ownership programmatically through the Windows SharePoint Services Object Model. See the Windows SharePoint Services Software Developers Kit for more information.

Change the owner of a site from SharePoint Central Administration

1. Click Start, point to All Programs, point to Administrative Tools, and then click SharePoint Central Administration.

2. On the SharePoint Central Administration page, in the Security Configuration section, click Manage site collection owners.

3. On the Manage Site Collection Owners page, in the Site URL box, type the URL of the site, and then click View.

   The information for the current site owner and secondary owner appears automatically on the page when you click View.

4. In the Site Owner section, in the User name box, type the user name (in the form DOMAIN\User_Name) and e-mail address (in the form someone@example.com) for the user who will be the site owner and administrator.

5. If you have a new secondary contact name, type that user name in the Secondary Owner section.

6. Click OK.

You can also change the site owner by using the siteowner operation with the Stsadmin.exe command line tool.

Change the owner of a site collection by using Stsadm.exe

1. Determine the URL of the site and the user name of the user you want to add as site owner. If you want to add a secondary owner, determine that user's user name.

2. On the server running Windows SharePoint Services, open a command prompt.

3. Type the following, replacing the italicized text with the correct information:

stsadm.exe -o siteowner -url URL [-ownerlogin DOMAIN\User_Name | - secondownerlogin DOMAIN\User_Name]

Command Line Parameters for siteowner operation

Related Links

• Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services Administrators Guide
• Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services Software Developer's Kit