SharePoint administrators comparision

What the Farm admin can do and what cannot?

The following articles describe differences between SP admins:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc288186.aspx

SharePoint group	Does role exist by default?	Can do this	Cannot do this
Farm Administrators	Yes	Perform administrative tasks in Central Administration Take ownership of any content site.	Administer individual sites or site content unless they take ownership of the site.

Group	Does role exist by default?	Can do this	Cannot do this
Administrators	Yes. Windows group that exists by default; not a SharePoint group.	Install products. Create new Web applications and new Internet Information Services (IIS) Web sites. Start services. Deploy Web Parts and new features to the global assembly cache. Perform all farm-level tasks in Central Administration (provided that the Central Administration site is located on the local computer). Run the Stsadm command-line tool.  Note: Being a server-level administrator is a pre-requisite of running the Stsadm command-line tool. Depending on which command you actually run, you might need additional permissions. For example, if you run stsadm.exe –o deleteweb, the command requires that the account have write access to the content database that contains the Web application.	Administer individual sites or site content. Administer databases.

SharePoint group	Does role exist by default?	Can do this	Cannot do this
Site collection administrator	Yes	Perform all administration tasks for sites within the site collection.	Access the Central Administration site.

SharePoint group	Does role exist by default?	Can do this	Cannot do this
Site nameOwners	Yes	Perform administration for the site only, not the entire site collection. Perform administrative tasks for documents, lists, and libraries.	Access the Central Administration site. Perform site collection administration tasks, such as restoring items from the second-stage Recycle Bin and managing the site hierarchy.