Good SharePoint Expertise

Many organisations roll-out SharePoint without considering the resources needed to own and manage SharePoint, particularly the human resources. The initial focus is often placed on the technical side of the development and the initial go-live, ongoing management of the site is given little thought. One area that is often given the very least resources to is training, which might be more often than not a mistake. Without adequate training for all users concerned the SharePoint deployment will fail.

This document seeks to detail the 5 skilled separate concerns needed to deal with and leverage SharePoint as well as the training necessary for each.

Although this article details these concerns separately this will not mean that they cannot be performed by the same person. The only caveat to that's that the main SharePoint owner should never be in IT - this really is explained in a separate document that is available titled Seven Pillars of SharePoint.

It must also be noted that the specifications of concern is just not absolute, and as every organization will be different so will be the responsibilities allocated to a skill. These responsibilities should be tuned to suit the internal layout of your organization and the skills you've got in-house. This document will guide you through identifying the skilled areas and should help you to pick the moat appropriate member of staff to fulfil each role.

Once SharePoint has been deployed within your organization you will discover several skills needed to maintain the system and also to develop it in line with your corporate strategy. These skills are Best SharePoint viewed as separate concerns, and if possible best serviced by different people. Obviously this is not always the case, but by analysing the abilities matrix as if it were separate people it is much easier to understand.

There are four main players in the world of SharePoint - SharePoint System Administrator, Super User, SharePoint Designer and Web Developer. These terms will be referred to continually throughout this document.

We have selected to omit the fifth player from this diagram -the End User. End Users contribute to SharePoint but are not necessary for developing the system; we shall discuss End Users by the end of this document.

Skill Area 1 - SharePoint System Administrator

Perhaps among the most misunderstood skills in SharePoint is that of the System Administrator. Many people confuse the System Administrator with a concept known as a SharePoint Administrator (we make reference to this role as the Super User). In place of explaining the differences between the 2 roles I will explain the function of the SharePoint System Administrator in detail inside this section as well as the Super User in detail further on in the document.