The Two Important Roles Needed For Sharepoint Farm Administration

By Author: Dylan Rodriguez
Total Articles: 131
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SharePoint consulting team is aware that SharePoint Server 2007 is an application platform and simply an application, therefore maintaining a SharePoint farm does require numerous skills. The level of complication can easily be compared to that of SAP, although SharePoint does much more than that. Although the scope of skills is quite wide, it can be narrowed down to broadly two roles that of System Administrator and SharePoint Development Leader.
SharePoint System Administration role:
The SharePoint System Administration role is extremely broad because the administrator has to possess knowledge of both SQL Server and Windows Server. Hence, there are companies that rely on their SQL Server DBAs to adopt this role of SharePoint Administrator, as SharePoint tends to store its data in SQL Server databases. On the other hand, DBAs may not have the time or the desire needed to require Windows Server knowledge in order to build and manage a SharePoint farm. Hence, the System Administration role is quite often divided between two people who can work closely together such as a Windows Server Administrator and a SQL ...
... Server DBA.
The DBA skills needed for this role is the standard, which is needed for any SQL Server database, however the features of Windows Server that any SharePoint administrator needs to possess include:
IIS Manager and IIS 6/7 architecture
Active Directory (including LDAP queries)
SMTP
Windows Firewall
Powershell scripting
Server Manager and its functionality
DNS
Network Load Balancing (NLB)
Event Viewer and Performance Monitor
It is also important that the SharePoint administrator also has basic knowledge of Windows networking and authentication especially Kerberos. It is important that the SharePoint administrator is confident about using a diverse array of utilities such as Network Monitor 3.2, KLIST, ADSIEdit, LDAB browsers etc and are aware of how to troubleshoot network connections and authentication issues.
SharePoint development leader:
SharePoint consulting professionals can handle the role of SharePoint development leader because in this scenario the business aspect comes into focus. Invariably, there are certain aspects of SharePoint that would need to be modified to match business requirements, hence the customization of programming is always needed. Since SharePoint at the core is simply a ASP.Net web application, therefore it can be customized as per the client’s specifications.
The SharePoint development leader needs to possess not only excellent knowledge of ASP.Net, Javascript, CSS and XSLT but also a proper understanding of SharePoint architecture and SharePoint security. It is important that the SharePoint consulting and development leader is able to comprehend the details of SharePoint solutions and features and ensure that development is deployed as per the SharePoint solution rules.
It is important that the SharePoint development leader is also able to comprehend specific elements of SharePoint sites such as Site Templates, Style Libraries, Master Pages, Web Part libraries etc. It is important they have the requisite knowledge of IIS and applicationhost.config, web.config and machine.config settings. Another aspect that the SharePoint consulting or development leader should be acquainted with is the web parts and the out-of-the-box functionality of SharePoint. These are just some of the specifications that need to be looked into when appointing these two roles under SharePoint farm administration.

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