Automating the SharePoint Site owner change process

I’m the farm administrator of 5000+ site collection. People moving from role to role used to send a mail to me, for changing the site collection owners. hmm, for these requests I’ve to manually go and check, for which site collection owner needs to be changed, Is the requester is a previous site owner, is the URL provided is valid, etc.

How about automating this process? Well, I’ve done that.

Here is the over all idea.

1. Create a list with the fields: URL of the site collection, Reason for change, New Primary owner, New secondary owner,etc. With content approval enabled – Let the end users come and fill this list.
2. Create a .Net console application and place the application under task scheduler in one of the WFE, Let the application run every day, read the pending site ownership change requests, validate and change the site owners programmatically, approve/reject the request and then send a mail to the requester and consolidated mail to farm administrator. Sounds good? yes.

Here is the over all flow:

Similarly, I’ve automated the Site delete process too. (End users used to request to delete their site collection, when they don’t need it, or when the project goes to the End.)