Prevent site deletion

Question

In our Sharepoint implementation users have been granted site collection admin rights. On a few occasions they've managed to delete a subsite or even the entire site collection. I'd like to be able to block this but not being a developer I'm finding it pretty tricky.

I've had a look at the MSIT site delete capture tool to try to understand how that's working and it seams fairly straight forward. I want to override the delete function and either block it entirely or have the user type a password. What I can't see is any way to fully override the default behavior as it looks like the MSIT tool simply adds some functionality (backs up the site) then falls back into the default behavior.

So my question is, can I prevent the default behavior or can I only add actions before or after it fires?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

Two answers:

1. You cannot prevent site deletes without either coding up something yourself, or buying a product to help you with "site lifecycle management" or "site governance" or some other vague term they use to describe this sort of thing.
2. The Site Delete Capture Tool may be good enough for you. It doesn't prevent any kind of deletions, but it does take a crude backup that (hopefully) allows you to restore anything they delete. We're using this tool in production and it works.

Answer 2

You could try to edit the site settings aspx file and comment out the delete site link, don't have a setup around to try that. While users could delete the site in other ways it would prevent the most common method.

Other option for important sites would be to make sure the site has a sub-site, if one does not already exist create one and don't user any access. The site would not be seen by the users and it would prevent them from deleting the parent site.

As for programming, in the before behavior you can return a false to stop the action. Just be sure to place a work around so you can delete a site.

Answer 3

Change the user permissions may be the best way to go. site collection admin is a crazy level of access for normal users.

Answer 4

A Site Collection administrator has the permission to delete sites and it should stay that way. We have modified MSIT to do additional stuff

The best way to limit user privileges is to put users in the right SharePoint group (ie) Owners, Members, Visitors or you could create a new group with right permission/permission levels.