Site Collection Administrators and Site Collection Owners in Windows SharePoint Services 2.0

Microsoft Corporation

Published: November 2003

Abstract:

Learn more about the differences between site collection administrators and site collection owners/secondary owners. This document provides instructions on specifying and changing which users have these permission levels.

Overview

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 Change the owner of a site from SharePoint Central Administration 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 Change the owner of a site collection by using Stsadm.exe section later in this paper to remove an owner.

See Also

Concepts

Giving a User Site Collection Administrator Rights (Windows SharePoint Services 2.0)
Changing Site Collection Owners (Windows SharePoint Services 2.0)