Change owner of a content

[ethan_wong]

Hi all,

I read in the Alfresco documentation about "Become owner" feature and this was to address the issue where staff has left the organisation and other staff need to gain control of the contents not owned by them.  I notice this command is available on Folder/Document Action of Share UI.

However, I wasn't able to see this command when I look at contents that are not created by me (which assuming I am looking at content of a staff that left the organisation). 

How then would I be able to become the owner of those contents? Is this because these actions is only available to certain roles? I could not find in Alfresco documentation much details on this actionable item.

Can someone please help? Thanks

[hardik1512]

You need to be a Site Manager or have permission to delete a file or folder to become its owner

[calvo · Accepted solution]

Hi,

As Hardik1512 _‌ said, if you have permissions you'll see an option to "become content owner". I attached an image of this possibility (In spanish, sorry).

Regards,

[ethan_wong]

Hardik1512 _ calvo _  Thanks for the clarification and visualisation (despite in Spanish) .  Perhaps I could add some detials to my scenario for a clearer picture.

What I would like to find out about this feature is whether it addresses the scenario where “the creator has left the organisation and we have a load of contents that we need to change owner”.  

To give you a little more details, we have 4 folder levels in a site and all branch users only has consumers roles at the first 3 levels but collaborators on the 4^th level onward.  With the way described, we need to make some/all users "manager" role at level 4 and beyond. However, wouldn't manager role would also allow user access to rules and permissions? Has anyone had problems opening up these actions to general users?

Would it make sense if a folder "manager" can assign the content to another owner? Has anyone done this before?

[douglascrp]

You can write your own custom version of the action, and then let the user select who is going to be the owner.

By doing so, you can even define a new custom group or something like that in order to decide who can execute the action, and the action's code can run as system, letting the code set the owner as whoever you want.

[ethan_wong]

Thanks for the feedback Douglas. We are aware that we can customize and have done so for folder controls.  However, we would like to keep as close to the standard version and avoid making more changes.  I had thought that this scenario would have been faced by many others and likely be an issue since earlier versions.  I was hoping someone already had got a way around this and could share how it could be done .. other than customizing rules.

I'll be very surprise if this scenario had not been faced by others as all organization using Alfresco would have had staff leaving.  The administrative overheads would only increase with the length of period a staff had used Alfresco.

[Overwerkt]

Alfresco's Become Owner feature falls very short of universal business requirements. All organizations need a way to assign "owner permissions" as needed to someone other than the original owner, who in most cases did not have Site Manager privileges. What is needed is an "Assign Owner" feature that transfers delete permissions to the new user who is supposed to have them.  For example, when the person who originally uploaded files to one or more site libraries leaves the organization, the Alfresco Administrator or the Site Manager(s) should able to assign (or transfer) delete permissions or full rights to the new employee who is taking over management of the documents or records. A best practice is that every document or record in an EDRMS must have an owner. So, when an employee who "owns" (has full rights to) the files he or she uploaded leaves the organization, it triggers a business process to assign a new owner to those records. The technology in turn should enable the fulfillment of that business process by having a feature that enables an Alfresco Administrator to assign ownership of those documents or records to the new owner.  Currently, the only two options are that only an Alfresco Administrator or a Site Manager can assign owner permissions to THEMSELVES, not to anyone else. Most of the time, in the real world, an Administrator is not going to "Become" owner of all of the files or records of a former employee.  Most Site Managers won't either; they already have delete rights to everything in the library. What is needed is a way to assign ownership to the user account for the new employee who is actually assuming ownership of the records.

In other words, a design enhancement is needed so that the ownership feature in Alfresco meets actual business needs for most organizations.