In many enterprises, multiple authors often work together developing content in a team environment. Team leaders typically handle large projects by assigning specific development responsibilities to authors. The Owner property allows team leaders and authors to assign documents to themselves and other authors to track who is responsible for a specific document. 


You view and change document assignments for a document using the Owner property in the Properties toolpane. Document assignments also appear in the Owner column in the Details View (and other views) in the Library and Outline Editor. You cannot edit the document Owner from a view, but you can sort documents by their owner assignment. 


Owner values are set by selecting an author from a predefined Owner list which is populated based on the names of the authors defined by your administrator. When the administrator deletes an author's name from the system, the name is also removed from the list and the Owner property for documents assigned to that author is reset to blank. If the administrator renames an author that was assigned to a document, updates to the Owner property occur when the document is checked into the server.


Note: The Owner list displays the author's name for Standard Authentication and the author name and domain name for Windows Authentication.


You can change the Owner to a single document or to multiple documents at the same time. Only one Owner can be set for each document.


To change the assignment of a document, you must be online and the document must be either checked in, checked out to you, or checked out to another author. When selecting multiple documents, the Owner property is not available if any of the documents in the selection are checked out to another author.


The Owner property is an external workflow property that is saved to the server and does not travel with the document. Therefore, Owner values are not included when you export a document.


Note: On import, the Owner value for documents is set to blank, which is the default value.


Since Owner values are not embedded with a document, they are not part of a document's version and do not roll back if you roll a document back to a previous version. However, if you delete a document with an Owner value and later restore the document, the server also restores the last value assigned to the document.
 
Note: Owner values are preserved by the server. If you delete a document and then later restore it, the server also restores the value.


To assign a document owner:

  1. Make sure you are working online.
     
  2. On the View menu, choose Properties Properties.
     
    You can also right-click any document and choose Properties.
     
  3. Select the document(s) to which you want to assign document responsibility.
     
    You can select multiple documents using the standard Windows selection keys (CTRL+click and SHIFT+click).
     
  4. In the Workflow category, click Drop Down in the Owner cell.
     
  5. Select a name from the list.

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