Microsoft Sharepoint Products and Technologies Resource Kit eBook

Changing Owners of Portal Sites
Chapter 18: Managing SharePoint Portal Server 2003 507
What happens when a portal 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 and need to change the owner of a
portal site to which you do not have administrative access, you can make the change
from the Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server Central Administration page or
from the command line by using the siteowner operation with Stsadm.exe.
Note Local server administrators and members of the SharePoint administrators
group can perform any task that a portal site administrator can perform
for a site collection.
When you create a portal site, you are automatically listed as the site owner.
Depending on your configuration, you might also be required to specify a secondary
owner for the portal site. Confirmation notifications are automatically sent to the
site owner and to the secondary owner, if one exists.
The owner and secondary owner of a portal site are members of the Administrator
site group. They are also identified separately in the configuration database as
site owners. One can change this owner flag either by using the Manage Site Collection
Owners page in SharePoint Portal Server 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
website administrative tasks.
The SharePoint Portal Server Central Administration page includes a link for
managing users for sites. Administrators on the server computer and members of the
SharePoint administrators group can use this link to change portal site owners, add
users or cross-site groups, remove users or cross-site groups, and change site group
membership, all without having to be an administrator on a specific site. Administrators
do, however, need to know the URL for the portal site.