Another command line-only administrative task from our friends at Microsoft.

From time to time I need to update a Sharepoint site's "owner". This is one of those things that is not included on the web-based admin page and can only be accomplished by running the stsadm tool via a command prompt. And then of course running stsadm.exe /? does not give us the syntax for most of the operations, one of which being the "siteowner" operation. So here it is:

stsadm.exe -o siteowner -url http://full_site_url -ownerlogin YOUR_DOMAIN\username_of_new_owner

The user must already be a member of the site on which you are attempting to make the user owner.

*Note: stsadm.exe is located at C:\program files\common files\microsoft shared\web server
extensions\60\bin by default. I have added the aforementioned path to the PATH system variable for ease of use.