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

Glossary

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