What are the responsibilities for an owner of a SharePoint Site?

Typically the owner of a departmental based SharePoint site would be someone that is not a member of the IT department but has be given slightly more training that a typical end user.

Often referred to as a super user, champion or SharePoint site owner.

These people will help maintain a SharePoint site and be the first port of call for any issues on the site before being escalated into an IT Support request case.

Typically the SharePoint site owners should have the Site Collection Admin role of a site. Meaning that they can:

• Create content such as documents and pages
• Delete documents and pages
• Build assets on the SharePoint site such as lists and libraries
• Add and remove colleagues from the site and create restricted areas
• Impossible for these users to be locked out of anything on the site
• Configure site settings and navigation bars

Why you should ensure there is an owner of a SharePoint Site?

If you can make sure there is a super user from each department area that is responsible for their own SharePoint site, this will reduce the overall demand on the traditional IT department.

It will mean that end users have someone they know within their department to go and ask questions to rather than raising a support ticket straight away.

Not only does this mean that departments will take more ownership over their own data but it will also reduce the amount of resource required from the IT department.

Tracking down the owner of a SharePoint Site for a SharePoint Migration

It might be that you are looking to migrate your SharePoint site or consolidate to exisiting SharePoint sites into one.

You might be looking to split out some classic SharePoint Online sites into modern Microsoft Teams.

Perhaps you are migrating from an on-premise version of SharePoint such as SharePoint 2013 or SharePoint 2016.

Although in this demonstration we will be showing you how to find the owner of a SharePoint Online site. Similar methods and techniques can be used for on-premise versions of SharePoint as well.

Find the owner of a SharePoint Site to discuss storage issues

Often as a SharePoint administrator you need to be checking that sites are not exceeding SharePoint storage thresholds.

If you noticed that there was a site that had a very large volume of documents or exceeding a fair usage of storage space. You might wish to contact the site owner to discuss ways of tidying up and reducing the overall storage space

What if the owner of a SharePoint Site has left the organisation?

If the owner of a specific SharePoint site has left the organisation you should seek to replace them as the SharePoint site collection admin of their sites as soon as possible.

If you are an IT admin with SharePoint admin role, You should be checking the SharePoint sites for signs of activity from their colleagues that might make a suitable replacement.

To find these people you could try the following:

• Look for other users that have Site collection Admin or full control access.
• Check the page library and see who has been creating or modifying SharePoint pages recently.
• Go take a look in the document libraries and see who has been creating or modifying documents frequently.
• If there is a Microsoft Team associated to the SharePoint site and you have access to the Teams admin centre you could add yourself as a member of the Team. Then drop a message into the General channel to ask about a replacement Site Owner for the employee that has since left.