Transfer Owner permissions

What are the use cases for transferring Owner permissions?

There are a few scenarios in which a System Admin may need to transfer Owner permissions on behalf of another user. These include:

• Someone in your team has a new job and isn't managing the same projects anymore.

• Someone has left your organization entirely, so you remove that user from the plan. Now, you need to assign Owner permissions for their Smartsheet items.

  If you're not sure which items belong to a removed user or have no active Admin or Owner, use the abandoned items report in Admin Center to get a complete list before transferring Owner permissions.

• Someone in your plan stops using Smartsheet.

What if there's no current Owner?

If the item has no current Owner because the original Owner was removed from the plan before Owner permissions were transferred, for example, you can't use the transfer-all workflow described in this article. Instead, use the share-to-self pathway to claim ownership directly. For steps, see Item ownership overview.

What behaviors should I watch for?

• This operation transfers all the user's items. It's not possible to select individual items to transfer.
• When you transfer Owner permissions to someone else, you keep the hierarchy of those items in place. Even when the Owner permissions for the underlying sheets or reports change, your dashboard widgets continue to work.
• The user receiving the transfer must be an active Member with a paid seat. Free users (Contributors and Guests) and users with Provisional Member status don't appear as transfer targets.
• Transfers involving tens of thousands of items may time out. If this happens, ask the item Owner to transfer their largest workspaces individually first, then retry the bulk transfer.

Workspace permissions

If you transfer Owner permissions of items within a workspace, the outcome depends on the new Owner's current access level: 

• If the target user already has Admin or Owner-level access to the workspace, the items stay in the workspace, and the target user becomes their owner.
• If the target user doesn't have Admin or Owner-level access to the workspace, the items remain in the workspace, the target user becomes Admin of the transferred items, and the current workspace Owner becomes the Owner of those items.

Transfer Owner permissions of items

1. In Admin Center, select the Menu icon in the upper left corner and navigate to Users and Groups > User Roles and Reports.
2. On the User Roles and Reports page (User Management page in the legacy model), select the user who owns the item you want to transfer.

3. Select the Kebab menu    and then select Transfer Owner Permissions...

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4. Enter the user email address of the new Owner.
5. Select Transfer.

If the transfer fails, an error message displays. For assistance, reach out to the Support team through the Smartsheet Support Portal.