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.

One of our Sharepoint servers is isolated from our network due to fact that it is accessed from the internet via Neoteris, so it is not aware of our Active Directory, etc.

This gets a bit messy when it comes time to add a new user to a Sharepoint site (even more when that user is not on our network and needs to be set up with remote access, but that is out of scope here).

The process includes creating a new local user account and then adding that local account as a user to the Sharepoint site. There are several headaches that come with the creation of a local user account mainly stemming from the fact that working with local Windows accounts is not as manageable as users in ADUC.

An issue I have seen a few times now is also possible in an AD environment, but probably isn't seen as often as the conditions causing the problem are less likely.

Issue - When you try to add a user to a 2003 Portal Server or WSS site, you receive the following error message:

Can not add the user because a user with that name already exists

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