Site collection administrators

- Another role that we've been talking about is the site collection administrators. And I've been saying that there's two special site collection administrators that we call the primary and secondary site collection administrators. So here I am in Central Administration, so I'm in a non-premises deployment and I'm a farm administrator so this is not something you would have access to unless you were in that particular scenario. And I'm gonna create a brand new site collection so we can see the difference between a primary and secondary site collection administrator and then a site collection administrator who would get added after the fact.

So I'll call this SCA a Demo so it's a site collection administrator demo, I'll put an SCA Demo. I will base this top level site of this site collection on a team site template. This is where I'd make that choice as a farm administrator. And here's where I'm gonna choose the primary site collection administrator, I'll make that me. And then over here I'll choose the secondary site collection administrator. It's optional to put in a secondary site collection administrator, but usually there will be one.

So the primary and secondary site collection administrator are gonna be the ones who are gonna get notifications of say, for example there had been a quota attached to this site collection, and that quota was, say you could only get to be 10 gigabytes in your site collection, which would be fairly large, and when it got to seven gigabytes send the primary and secondary site collection administrator an email that say, Hey, you're running out of space. Those types of things will go to the primary and secondary site collection administrator. That's one of the reasons that these are such important roles.

I'm gonna go ahead and click Okay and then we'll come back into the site collection after it gets created and take a look at what happens if we add other site collection administrators. So the site collection was successfully created. If I click Site Action, Site Settings, and I click Site Permissions, and I click Site Collection Administrators you'll see that A and spike were added. At this point I can add B, if I want to, or C, or D, or any other user I want to be site collection administrators and they'll have all the rights of site collection administrators, but they won't be the primary or secondary, there's only one primary and one secondary and those are the individuals that SharePoint's going to use to notify of things.

So as a site collection administrator the role that I'm playing isn't just to do all the things of site owners, but I also have all these links here under Site Collection Administration. So any of the settings that relate to the site collection as a whole, they're going to be the responsibility of a site collection administrator. So for example, if I click Site Collection Features, this is the matrix of features that are either activated or not activated at the site collection level. If for some reason I needed to activate the SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure shown here, well that's not automatically activated if I use a team size top level site collection.

So as a site collection administrator I'd have to activate it here and then my site owners could come through and activate that feature at each individual site within the site collection. This is one example of the role of site collection administrator, and there are many site collection administrators responsible for the environment of the entire site collection.