If you have ever needed to track down the owner of a Microsoft Form, you likely have run into a dead end or a frustrating round of trial and error. Whether the Form was created for collecting data, creating a quiz for your Class Team, or some other reason I’m here to tell you there’s a better way to find some answers!
It is well documented that, as a global admin, you can transfer Forms to a new owner. However, you’ll need to know the email address of the original Form owner. There are just a few steps to take and you’ll be armed with the info you need to get that email address.
You’re going to need a couple of things (NOTE: You can likely do this with another browser/packet tracing tool, but I’m using Edge so that’s the perspective you get here):
- Microsoft Edge
- URL of Form in question
- Azure AD PowerShell module
Start by opening Microsoft Edge, and opening DevTools by pressing F12. Once you have DevTools open, paste the Form URL into the address bar and load the Form.
Once the Form loads, navigate to Network and Fetch/XHR in DevTools
In the “Name” column, look for entries related to Forms. This may be something that starts with “ResponsePageStartup” or “runtimeFormsWithResponses”. There may be a couple of them so you may need to look at a few entries. What we are looking for is the one that has “form:” under “data” in the accordion menu as shown below
Expand “form:” and scroll down until you find the “ownerID” attribute which is going to correspond to the Azure Active Directory Object ID for the owner.
Now that you have the ownerID attribute handy, simply hop over to PowerShell, load the Azure Active Directory Module, and connect to your Azure tenant. I’m completely sure you can also use the MS Graph to do this but we’re using Ol’ Reliable here. You’ll be using the Get-AzureADObjectByObjectID commandlet along with the ownerID we pulled from above. (You can also just use Get-AzureADUser if you prefer.)
Get-AzureADObjectByObjectID -ObjectIds <ownerID>Now that you have the owner info, you can proceed with transferring ownership or whatever other reason you had for needing to know the owner.
Caveats
There are a couple of caveats here. This will work if you have created a Form in Teams either by “at mentioning Forms” or natively with the Forms add-in. However, if you have a Group Form, the owner is going to be the Office 365 Group and not a specific person. Also, you’ll need to dive a little deeper into the trace to find the owner ID for a Group Form.
It's Partly Cloudy 
Fantastic information since Microsoft still develop products that lack basic administrative control – thanks!
Hi, thanks for this helpful post. I have a slight variant on this issue that I am stuck with and currently failing to find an answer so am hoping you might be able to help.
We have a user who owns a form who is on long term leave so their account is still active but can’t be contacted to give us access, any way we can take ownership of it ? Your trick only works for people who have left so unless i soft delete their account I can’t do much 😐
I feel its fate I found your blog and this question on the exact date (a year later) 🙂
There isn’t a good option for your scenario. You can transfer a Form for a user that is disabled though so maybe you could temporarily disable the account, transfer the form, then enable it again.
Thank you, I feared this might be the only answer which does seem pretty insane. I do hope Microsoft get some decent admin tools for Forms as its being used a lot in my organisation.
With regards to my issue, disabling an account is a no go as there is a lot of auditing around our ID Management system it would probably cause more hassle that it will fix!
Thanks again and if anyone else has any other ideas I am all ideas as this wont be the first or last time this happens!