Changing the Owner of a Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 Site
Windows SharePoint Services
Microsoft Corporation
July 2003
Applies to: Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 2.0
Introduction to Windows SharePoint Services 2.0
Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services organizes Web sites into site collections, each of which has a top-level Web site. This top-level Web site can have multiple subsites, and each subsite can have multiple subsites. Because sites are nested in a hierarchy within the site collection, managing them all can be challenging.
What happens when a top-level Web site owner leaves your organization, or when you must add a user to or remove a user from a site for which you do not have administrative rights? If you are an administrator on the server computer and need to change the owner of a site to which you do not have administrative access, you can make the change from the SharePoint Central Administration page or from the command line by using the siteowner operation with Stsadm.exe.
Note
Members of the local Administrators group on the server and members of the SharePoint administrators group can perform any task that a site collection administrator can perform for a site collection.