What is a SharePoint Administrator?

The role of the SharePoint Administrator is often a topic that comes up when beginning to plan out a SharePoint implementation, as it should. The various roles and responsibilities should be clearly defined upfront, but I often receive the initial feedback from customers that we should be able to just tell them what those responsibilities are. The problem with that philosophy is that the organization, management, goals, and skill sets of every organization are not the same.

The role of a SharePoint Administrator will vary depending upon your organization. If you are looking for the SharePoint Administrator to be the "lone wolf" that can support everything you need to get started and that same person will be solely responsible for keeping the environment running, the list of roles and responsibilities will be different than that of a team approach. Differences will certainly occur based upon such things as your need to support environments around the clock or the view of how highly sensitive your data is or if you have a highly-audited environment. Some administrators will be license police, procurement clerks, infrastructure management, farm administration, back up, recovery support, and help desk. Some organizations have people and roles (part-time to full-time) that have specializations in each of these areas.

Because of the wide variety of organizations, a discussion of decent length should be undertaken to understand the responsibilities that you consider part of the role. Once you understand what those responsibilities entail, you can determine if this is just a part-time job duty or a full-time job in and of itself. In a nutshell, the SharePoint Administrator should be responsible for the following (though not a standard)

Managing and checking the overall server health and functionality Monitoring SharePoint disk space usage through the built-in SharePoint reports for each site collection Managing SharePoint permissions Analyzing and reporting upon SharePoint usage and activity Moving/copying sites Supporting network load balancing needs and ensuring its correct operation (NLB) Regular review of the events and messages reported in Event Viewer and Performance Monitor Regular review, clean-up, management and configuration of SharePoint accounts and sites. This portion of the role will work closely with an Active Directory administrator if they are separated. Regularly analyzing SharePoint content and storage Monitoring SharePoint trends (e.g. site usage and growth, disk space usage and growth) Setting up alerts and enforcing policies Regularly auditing your SharePoint environment Identifying and reporting governance violations Checking for operating system, SQL Server and SharePoint patches and cumulative updates. In many ways, the SharePoint Administrator has become a jack-of-all-trades. They are managing services and scheduled jobs within the SharePoint environment, they are creating new sites and lists, installing new web parts, doing backups, managing the Shared Services, educating users on how to use features like InfoPath, managing governance policies and permissions. The SharePoint Administrator effectively becomes: - See more at: http://www.skylinetechnologies.com/Blog/Article/128/What-is-a-SharePoint-Administrator.aspx#sthash.S53MM0ag.dpuf