Add or remove site collection administrators (SharePoint Foundation 2010)

 

Applies to: SharePoint Foundation 2010

This article describes how to add and remove site collection administrators. A site collection administrator can configure the appearance and behavior of the site, configure search settings and site directory settings, and allocate storage space. A site collection can have one or two administrators.

In this article:

  • Add a site collection administrator

  • Remove a site collection administrator

Add a site collection administrator

Use this procedure when you want to make a user a site collection administrator for a specific site collection.

Warning

A site collection can have only two administrators. The steps in this procedure describe how to change the secondary site collection administrator. This leaves the primary site collection administrator unchanged, and removes the previous secondary site collection administrator if there was a secondary site collection administrator.

To add a site collection administrator by using Central Administration

  1. Verify that you have the following administrative credentials:

    • To add a site collection administrator, you must be a member of the Farm Administrators group on the computer that is running the SharePoint Central Administration Web site.
  2. On the home page of the SharePoint Central Administration Web site, select Application Management.

  3. On the Application Management page, under Site Collections, select Change site collection administrators.

  4. On the Site Collection Administrators page, click the arrow next to the site collection name and select Change Site Collection.

  5. If the site collection to which you want to add an administrator is listed, select the URL of the site collection and then click OK. If the site collection is not listed, click the arrow next to the Web application name; click Change Web Application; select the name of the Web application that contains the site collection; select the URL of the site collection; and then click OK.

  6. In the Secondary Site Collection Administrator area, either type the name of the user whom you want to add by using the format <domain>\<username> or select the user by using the address book.

  7. Click OK.

To add a site collection administrator by using Windows PowerShell

  1. Verify that you meet the following minimum requirements: See Add-SPShellAdmin.

  2. On the Start menu, click All Programs.

  3. Click Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Products.

  4. Click SharePoint 2010 Management Shell.

  5. At the Windows PowerShell command prompt, type the following command to replace the secondary site collection administrator:

    Set-SPSite -Identity "<SiteCollection>" -SecondaryOwnerAlias "<User>"
    

    Where:

    • <SiteCollection> is the URL of the site collection to which you want to add a site collection administrator.

    • <User> is name of the user whom you want to add in the format <domain>\<username>.

The previous procedure shows a common way to use the Set-SPSite cmdlet to add a site collection administrator. You can specify different parameters to configure different settings for a site collection. For more information, see Set-SPSite.

Note

We recommend that you use Windows PowerShell when performing command-line administrative tasks. The Stsadm command-line tool has been deprecated, but is included to support compatibility with previous product versions.

Remove a site collection administrator

Use this procedure to specify the user to be removed from the site collection administrator list. This procedure does not remove the user from Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS).

To remove a site collection administrator by using Central Administration

  1. Verify that you have the following administrative credentials:

    • To remove a site collection administrator, you must be a member of the Farm Administrators group on the computer that is running the SharePoint Central Administration Web site.
  2. On the home page of the SharePoint Central Administration Web site, select Application Management.

  3. On the Application Management page, under Site Collections, select Change site collection administrators.

  4. On the Site Collection Administrators page, click the arrow next to the site collection name and select Change Site Collection.

  5. If the site collection from which you want to remove an administrator is listed, select the URL of the site collection and then click OK. If the site collection is not listed, click the arrow next to the Web application name; click Change Web Application; select the name of the Web application that contains the site collection; select the URL of the site collection; and then click OK.

  6. Every site collection must have a primary site collection administrator. If you want to remove the primary site collection administrator, you must replace it with a different primary site collection administrator. To do so, select the current administrator's name; press the Delete key; and then either type the name of the replacement site collection administrator by using the format <domain>\<username> or select a replacement site collection administrator by using the address book.

  7. To remove the secondary site collection administrator, select the administrator's name, and then press the Delete key.

  8. Click OK.