Granting full access to a user on all site collections within a web application

Today i got a question from a colleague about how to grant full access to a user on all existing site collections. This is not the first time that i got that question, so i decided to put a small blogpost covering this subject.

It's quite easy to do, you just have to now how:

Go to SharePoint Central Administration.
Click on the Application Management tab.
Under Application Security click on Policy for Web Application
Click Add Users
Confirm your settings on the screen (defaults should be what you want) and click Next
Now enter your user or group of users
Click the box beside Full Control – Has full control.
Click Finish

Piece of cake, isnt it?

Iterating through user profiles

some time ago i wrote an article about iterating through user profiles for non-admins (click here).

Today, i had the same problem, but my solution that was given, isnt optimal. I had to iterate through about 50.000 user profiles, that was a bit slow ;) And, only administrators could iterate through those profiles, even RunWithElevatedPrivileges didnt work.

I am glad that Microsoft hotfixed this problem (on the 8th of may 2008), you can download it here:

KB 952294. Now everyone can iterate through user profiles..