My Viewing SharePoint Site Administrators web part/tutorial is MSD2D Tip Of The Week (at least, via the email newsletter they send out), but the email newsletter had my name and article title but the body to last week’s tip. If you want to see it, check it out on the site. It walks through the creation of a web part that you can put on a SharePoint site (WSS or SPS) and see the list of administrators for that site (a handy thing if you have a lot of sites and people want to know who to contact for help).

I will be following this up with an additional tutorial at some point because there are some security foibles you have to work around in SharePoint that the web part doesn’t address. For example, My Sites are each individual site collections, each with a different root-level administrator - by default, there are no common administrators on WSS sites you create under My Site, and the web part I wrote about uses the site administration group to get access to the list of users and determine Administrators for the site.

What I ended up having to do to get around it was create a “helper web service” that I could call from the part such that I could run the web service as the ASP.NET process user (thus having full access to all sites, including stuff under My Sites), which, in turn, uses the web services exposed by WSS to retrieve the data. It’s the “long way around,” but since you have to be an Administrator in order to get any user information, I don’t see any other way to do it. You have to emulate an Administrator, and that’s the only way to do it on a large scale, and for multiple servers/sites (which is what we have to do).