Category Archives: Site Owner

New Product Launch: Site Owner Manager for SharePoint

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INTRODUCING SITE OWNER MANAGER FOR SHAREPOINT

THE EASY WAY TO IDENTIFY AND MANAGE SITE OWNERS IN YOUR SHAREPOINT ENVIRONMENTS

Every SharePoint Administrator has struggled with this at one time or another. Hundreds of sites… who is responsible for each site? Who can a user reach out to for questions on content and permissions? Invariably sites get more than one user with full-control permissions – but who among those is really responsible for the site – and how does a user find out who they are and how to contact them?

As an Administrator – wouldn’t it be great to have a dashboard that shows you every site in the farm and who the current owner is? What happens when an owner leaves the company or role – how do you know they are no longer active? And how about contacting all of those site owners to let them know about outages, maintenance and upgrades?

Site Owner Manager solves these problems! I invite you take a look at the solution – It can be setup in minutes and instantly producing results. Download the free 15-day evaluation today! Easily upgradable to the full version buy purchasing a license.

Click here to START MANAGING YOUR SITE OWNERS!

Announcing: Site Owner Manager 2.0 for SharePoint 2013/16/19

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Hi Everyone. For the past year I have seen an uptick in search queries for how to manage Site Owners in SharePoint – which led people to an article and solution I published in the early days of this blog. Obviously this is still a challenge that needs a more robust solution. So I began to research what features and capabilities people were looking for in managing site owners. Everyone I asked were looking some common capabilities – including: a central place to manage site owners; have a site owner be set or selected when the site is provisioned; and identify inactive owners. I think I now have a solution that meets all of these challenges and more.

Announcing Site Owner Manager 2.0 – which will be available shortly for on-prem versions of SharePoint 2013, 2016 and 2019*. Here are some of the key features:

  • Ability to manage all site owners from a single control panel in Farm Administration
  • Site owner information displays automatically at the bottom of the Left Navigation panel (see screenshots below) or can be added to any custom element (DIV, SPAN, etc) in your custom branding; users can easily see and contact their site owner – reducing calls to your admins or helpdesk
  • Solution scans all existing sites and make suggestions for site owners based on the following criteria
    • Suggested owner can be the original creator of the site

      -OR-

    • Suggested owner can be determined based on an analysis of the individual site – taking into account most significant content-authors and/or users with full-control permissions on the site
    • Suggested Owners can be automatically used as Current Owners if no current owner is specified
    • System also keeps Previous Owner information as well as who initiates a change in ownership
    • Identifies orphaned/removed sites and inactive owners automatically
  • Ability to get alerts when Site Owners are changed by other admins
  • Ability to email all active site owners directly from the Farm Administrator console – great for alerting owners to outages, changes and other announcements targeted only to site owners
  • Fast installation and immediately adds value as the tedious process of identifying site owners goes away

Other Benefits

  • Free 15-day evaluation version; limited to the first 5 sites in each web application; activates to full product with license key – no reinstallation necessary
  • Farm license – no per-user or other pesky licensing nonsense. Unlimited sites, web applications and users on a single SharePoint Farm.
  • Access to the developer for any issues or feature requests/improvements

Availability/Pricing

  • The solution is currently being beta tested by several folks while I finish up my own punch-list, documentation and such to get the product ready for launch. Probably looking at sometime in early February 2019.
  • Final pricing has not been determined yet; I expect it to fall in the $500-800 USD range; Paid-support will also be available at $250/yr per farm license
  • What about SharePoint Online? SPO is a very different beast to the on-prem product and presents different challenges. If there is enough interest I will look into it; send me feedback.

Some Screenshots

Screenshot showing the Site Owner control present in the Left-Navigation; Clicking on the user name will open their profile page; Link also supports presence/SIP information

Site Admins can easily update the Site Owner by going to Site Settings and choosing Set/Change Site Owner under Site Administration

Set/Change Site Owner screen

The management tools and settings are contained in Central Administration under System Settings/Farm Management

The Manage Site Owners screen; This is implemented as a standard SharePoint list – which means it has all of the same capabilities – including exporting this data to Excel, setting custom alerts, bulk loading data in Quick Edit mode and more.

Default settings for the Site Owner Manager

Email Site Owners screen; Outbound SMTP needs to be configured in the farm to use this feature

Look for more information on this coming soon. If you are interested in evaluating the product please reach out to me so I can get it into your hands as soon as possible. Thanks!

* SharePoint 2019 support may be limited to Classic Experience sites due to limitations inherent to the newer Modern sites. Final support may change on or before launch.

Coming Soon: Site Owner for SharePoint 2010

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Hi Everyone. Work is nearly complete on the Site Owner control for SharePoint 2010. This solution will allow administrators to designate one user as a site’s ‘Owner’. The owner’s name will appear on each page at the bottom of the left-navigation (see screenshots below). The left-nav was chosen as it should be present on most intranet layouts. We’re inheriting the CSS of the left navigation too – so if you’ve branded your site the control will honor it. Also thinking about offering another spot to display the Owner’s name – or providing variables where you can plug the name into your branding as you see fit.

Looking to release the first version this week. A 15 day evaluation will be available. The solution will be priced at $20 per farm – very reasonable.

Some early screenshots:

The Site Owner settings in Site Settings

The Site Owner Settings Modal

The Site Owner control on a Blank Site

The User Name in the control is a hyperlink to the user’s My Profile page. If you have LCS/OCS installed in your AD (and are syncing the SIP Address) the control will show extended SIP information as well. You can also remove the Site Owner by going back into the settings page and clicking Remove (not shown).

I’m also going to provide some PowerShell goodness that will produce a report of all your Site Owners and an optional feature to force admins to specify a Site Owner when creating a new site.

As always I welcome feedback and suggestions. Look for the first version of the Site Owner control on the blog soon!