SharePoint: Site Owners – Display and Manage
Guest Author: Peter Allen
BitsOfSharePoint
One of the challenges I have with SharePoint is knowing who the site owner is for any given site or sub-site. Ownership is a critical component of any deployment. But ownership should be clearly communicated and maintained.
When I work on a deployment one area that I work on with the organization is to identify who the site owners are. Once this is identified we need to communicate this on the site. But if we rely on each owner to identify this on their site we will have different implementations of this, inconsistency for the end-user to follow and a decentralized setup. Also, there would be no easy way to see who all the site owners are and it would be a lot of work to go to each site to take note. Also, I always recommend that site owners create a club (this sounds so much more fun and less formal then a committee) that can meet on a monthly basis to talk best practices and share experiences and solutions.
Since SharePoint does not have any easy way to identify the site owner and provide a central location to track all this, I have come up with a solution. Below you will find my solution to the problem.
The solution involves a content editor web part (CEWP), a centralized list with a couple of views and a document library. The CEWP will be placed in every site collection and sub site. The CEWP will point to a script that will show the correct site owner based on the site URL. The list will house a list of all owners and the sites they own. The document library will house the script used.
Here is an overview of how it will work. By having the CEWP pulling both the script and list from a central place, you get the benefit of being able to change the ownership from a central place and if you want to customize the script you can do this too and it will be populated to all sites.
The result will look like this. You can then outline who the site owner is and even adding listing like helpdesk, designer or admin. These all can be added at any time.
The final result would look something like this:
Here is a link to the details on how to add this to your SharePoint deployment.
http://www.bitsofsharepoint.com/ExamplePoint/Site/SiteOwner.aspx
Hope this helps,
Peter
Guest Author: Peter Allen
BitsOfSharePoint
Peter Allen is President of BitsOfSharePoint Consulting LLC, based in Sacramento, CA. He has worked in the technology field for 15 years creating and deploying solutions in Healthcare, financial, construction, municipalities, telecom, and engineering firms. He provides solutions that address site architecture, taxonomy, useability and findability. He also speaks at SharePoint community events and blogs at his SharePoint site http://www.bitsofsharepoint.com.
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Great idea, I have been trying to find a solution very similar to this.
I am not keen on maintaining a custom list somewhere of all the site owners. Especially because SharePoint provides the “Site Collection Admins” already I’d rather just have a webpart that cleanly exposed the two site collection administrators for the site collection and maintain it there.
Nick,
I understand what you are saying if you only want Site Collection Admins. But Site Owners may not necessarily be the Site Admins. So in order to create the flexibility, I created this solution.
For example a site may have several users who have Full Control, but only one of them is the Site Owner or the person who manages and is the decision maker. If we pulled it from permissions then we would get a list of more then one person listed. This, I believe, would be confusing to the end user. Which person in the list is the true Site Owner.
Second it does not address having a centralized list of the site owners. This solution can span Web Apps, Site Collections and Sub-sites. When managing many Web Apps, Site Collections and Sub-sites, having a centralized list of owners can make it easy to manage many aspects of a SharePoint deployment.
I highly recommend starting a SharePoint Site Owners User Group within an organization to share best practices and to keep sites and site owners aligned.
I really like this idea. In my company environment we publish a public list of all SharePoint sites and who the primary and backup owners are for each site. This was done to reduce questions to the helpdesk about site content; knowing who the site owners are encourages the end users to go directly to the folks who can answer content questions. However an ongoing issue is site ownership changes or people being added to a site and not really knowing who the players are. By placing this site ownership information on the front of the site, it is more likely admin folks like me will be notified when someone has moved on and no longer owns the site and will easily let new users to the site know who to contact regarding content issues. Very good idea! Thank you!
This is a great idea and we have been using this for both our Internet and Intranet sites. On the Intranet we use a CEWP and ‘General Information’ template for each clinic/department SharePoint site. Clinic/department have hours of operations and Web Content Manager.
Here is an example of my information:
SharePoint/Webmaster Contact:
MCXE-IMD
719-526-2342, DSN: 691-2342
E-Mail: [email protected]
Is there any way to see the site owner name without using Central admin ?
I am not sure I understand what you are asking. This solution does not use or require access to Central Admin. Can you explain more?