1/26/2019: Site Owner Manager 2.0 is now available! Download it today!
The purpose of this solution is to help resolve a longstanding issue in SharePoint – Who owns a given site? Let’s start with defining who an ‘Owner’ is. While SharePoint has the concept of Site collection administrators (users with highly elevated permissions) it has no concept of who has responsibility for the content or upkeep of an individual site. In some cases they may be one and the same, but in many cases they are different people and with different levels of permissions on the site. Sites invariably have many users with Full Control permissions – but who is the single point-of-contact out of those people? There is the concept of the Site Author/Creator – but that is not exposed anywhere in the GUI – and that value is unalterable. Over time it may not represent the person responsible for the site they created.
This solution introduces the concept of a Site Owner. The Owner would be the primary point of contact for a site – and their name would be prominently displayed on each page of the site for easy identification. An owner can be identified at time of site-provisioning, in advance or through analysis of site content and permissions. Administrators can manage and assign site owners though an easy to use interface as well as quickly identify sites with missing owners and stale or inactive owners that need updating. Administrators can define if the owner is an individual or a SharePoint Group.
Requirements
- SharePoint 2013/2016/2019 Server (Standard or Enterprise)
- SharePoint 2019 compatibility limited to Classic Experience sites
- This will NOT work with SharePoint Online
Download Links
Click here to download the Site Owner Manager User Guide
Click here to download Site Owner Manager for SharePoint 2013/16/19
The product will run in Evaluation Mode for 15 days after it is first installed. During the evaluation only the first 5 sites in any web application will be scanned.
You can also buy a license and activate the full version of the product. The solution is licensed per-farm (not per user or front-end like a lot of other solutions).
Site Owner Manager License $499.00 USD
Site Owner Manager License + 1 Year Maintenance/Support $749.00 USD
Original Article Below
If you’re like us you have struggled with this at one point or another: Who ‘owns’ a SharePoint site. We define the owner as the main business or technical contact for the site – the user responsible for the overall content, permissions, and management of the site. This is another area where SharePoint is lacking – sure there is an ‘Owners’ permission group – but that could have many users in it. It really does not identify the single point-of-contact we want to manage. When we set out to design our new templates one requirement was that we collect and display the site owner in the footer of every page so visitors had a way to identify and contact the site owner without a lot of difficulty or calling the helpdesk to inquire.
Our Site Owner control is deployed at the site collection level and is built-in to our site definition (you can also feature-staple it into existing site templates). Code in the master page renders the footer with the Site Owner stored in a property-bag:
When our users provision a new site, they are prompted to specify a Site Owner. The site cannot be provisioned without making a choice here:
Site Administrators can easily update this property at a later time via the Site Settings page:
Now this is all nice and good – users can identify the site owners and we reduced calls to our helpdesk and SharePoint support teams. But here is the cool bit. With a little PowerShell, we can instantly produce a report of all of the site owners (along with their site data) and marry that back to Active Directory to see if any of the users are disabled or deleted. This way we can make sure the Site Owner values are correctly populated and active users are managing these sites. Also great for sending out bulk-emails to the Site Owners when maintenance is required or changes are being deployed into their sites:
So there is our take on displaying and managing SharePoint Site Owners. Hope you found it interesting. Be sure to look for my tweets and blog updates from the SharePoint Connections Conference starting March 26th.
SharePointAdept 
Hi, we have tested your solution on our DEV server; however, the site owner field appears to be optional, so you are still able to create a site without entering the required site owner information. Could we have installed this incorrectly? We are very interested in this solution if we can make this field required rather than optional. We are currently on version 2010 (standard). If we were to enable this solution in our 2010 environment (assuming we can get the site owner field to be required 🙂 , do you foresee any issues if/when we go to 2013?
Thanks for your help! -Paula Crist
Hi Paula, At the moment the Site Owner value is not a required field. Some of this is due to the nature of how the data is being stored. The new site must be provisioned before the Site Owner can be selected because it is stored in the site property bag. I suppose if the user cancelled out of the process I could try to delete the newly created site but that might be slightly problematic. Would need to investigate the option. As far as 2013 goes – this solution is untested on that platform and very likely will not function (unless you are running a 2010 site on 2013). 2013 support is being considered.