SharePoint site owner

Concept

A person who manages a SharePoint site: members of the Owners group have Full Control and can manage site permissions, settings and appearance. In a team site, the owners of the connected Microsoft 365 group are the site owners.

Description

On a SharePoint team site, the Owners group has the permission level Full Control. Microsoft Learn describes its members as "people who must be able to manage site permissions, settings, and appearance." On a team site connected to a Microsoft 365 group, the group owners become site owners.

A site administrator is a separate role: site administrators have full control of the site root and any subsites and can audit all site content. A site can have several site admins but only one primary administrator.

Microsoft's intranet governance guide notes that managing a site is often only a small part of a site owner's job, and that training for site owners should include the organization's policies and guidelines. With SharePoint Advanced Management, Microsoft offers a site ownership policy, which defines who is responsible for each site, sets minimum owner or admin counts and automates notifications, and site attestation, a regular review by site owners of whether the site is needed, who its owners and members are, and its permissions and sharing settings. Site access reviews let administrators hand reports on overshared sites to site owners for review.

Sources (Microsoft Learn, checked in November 2026): https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/default-sharepoint-groups , https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/intranet-governance , https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/advanced-management

Related topics in brief

• SharePoint · Related to · Product
  Microsoft 365's platform for intranets, document libraries and team sites. Most files shared in Teams are stored in SharePoint, so its permissions directly decide what Copilot can find.
• SharePoint governance · Related to · Concept
  The policies, roles, responsibilities and processes that control how an organization uses SharePoint: who owns sites, how sites are created and shared, and how content is reviewed.
• SharePoint permissions · Related to · Concept
  How access to SharePoint sites and content is controlled: through a Microsoft 365 group or the SharePoint groups Owners, Members and Visitors, and through sharing links for single files and folders.
• Site access reviews · Related to · Product
  A SharePoint Advanced Management feature that lets administrators delegate the review of overshared sites, found in data access governance reports, to the site owners, who confirm who should keep access.
• SharePoint site lifecycle · Related to · Concept
  Policies in SharePoint Advanced Management that keep sites in use, owned and reviewed: a site ownership policy, an inactive site policy and a site attestation policy. They do not delete sites directly.
• Orphaned sites · Related to · Concept
  SharePoint or Teams sites that no longer have an active owner, typically because the original owner left the organization, while their content and permissions remain in the tenant.
• SharePoint Advanced Management · Related to · Product
  Set of governance and lifecycle tools for SharePoint, such as site access reviews, inactive site policies, restricted access control and oversharing reports, included with Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Glossary

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Experts on related topics

• Mirko Peters ✔ · via SharePoint

Maintained by Mirko Peters (Microsoft MVP) · Last updated: 2026-11-11