A: In order to understand what skill sets are needed, organizations must first make sure that a few things are in place. Two of the most important things for any organization, big or small, are to first architect a scalable foundation and plan for administrative efforts to maintain SharePoint. The first budget allocations must include these in order to have a firm foundation from which to grow.
The next step is to identify someone with the ability to advocate and promote SharePoint's usage in the organization. This role should be easy to find from within because often enough this is not an IT person but a business power user who has a deep knowledge of your business and is passionate about how SharePoint's feature sets can improve efficiency.
While that may sound easy enough you still need to fill IT-based roles. You may still not be familiar with the current IT industry title to skill sets matrix. So in that case it is better to start asking yourself who in the organization will do the following:
- Install it
- Support it
- Recover it
- Fix it
- Provide access
- Expand on the initial deployment
- Know when to call in consulting services
- Help end users adopt it
Once you have drawn up this list you may very well find that one person may cover more than one of these functions and in some cases all of them. As mentioned earlier, smaller SharePoint Foundation deployments can be carried out by one individual. Organizations that have greater content and staff resources can permit themselves to staff more personnel to keep SharePoint running. For organizations of 100-1000 staff members, the following positions or their combinations will more than likely be needed:
- System Administrator: The System Administrator would typically be in charge of the acquisition, installation, and maintenance of the hardware infrastructure as well as day-to-day operation support, review existing infrastructure setup, develop best practices, create operation guidelines, install operating-system updates/service packs, and maintain logs.
- SharePoint Farm Administrator: The SharePoint Farm Administrator is responsible for global portal configuration, policies, procedures, and portal vision, application management, search administration, workflow management, backup and restore, data configuration, and content deployment.
- SQL Administrator: The SQL Administrator restores, backs up, and maintains the SQL environment as well as any security and performance tuning.
- Enterprise Site Collections Administrator: The Enterprise Site Collections Administrator maintains search settings, site-collection usage reports, storage-space allocation, site-collection features, site hierarchy, site-usage reports, workflows, and Master page layouts. Also in many cases they take on Level 1 and Level 2 support.
- Active Directory Resources: Active Directory Resources set up the portal Active Directory for authentication and assist in synchronization of SharePoint with Active Directory.
Once these roles are in place and there have been good returns on the Proof of Concept or Pilot program then the time has come to improve and customize SharePoint for a production-deployment, in other words time to build upon SharePoint's capabilities.
For organizations greater than 1000 members in staff, this may first necessitate increasing the layers of the positions described earlier; it also will certainly mean adding on development based skill sets such as the following positions:
- Developers to build upon existing custom look and feel, modify templates, build new web parts, and write ASP.NET code
- Product and Program Management that is responsible for business advocacy and resources, delivering solutions and advocacy to satisfied stakeholders
- SharePoint Branding Designer who enhances the Out of the Box User Interface and usability, creates and change images, CSS, master pages, and layouts