Seven Qualities of a Highly Effective SharePoint Administrator

SharePoint administrators are the main drivers of the SharePoint farm. They’re responsible for maintaining all of your farms in the organization. Administrator duties include acting as the guru for end-user adoption, implementing design plans, ensuring the stability of the farms, and creating governance and security for all SharePoint sites and application. When your organization is looking for a highly effective SharePoint administrator, keep an eye out for these seven qualities.

1. Adept at Configuring SharePoint Farms and Architectures

Your SharePoint administrator should be able to configure and maintain any SharePoint farm. They need the infrastructure and architectural knowledge to handle everything from small to large-scale farms, so that they’re capable of handling your business growth.

2. A Strong Understanding of IIS Manager, Active Directory, Network Balancing and SMTP Servers
SharePoint administrators also need knowledge of the technology that plays a big role in SharePoint integration and performance. The key skill sets required include working with IIS Manager and Active Directory, as well as balancing servers and setting up SMTP servers.

SharePoint interacts with all the servers in your organization, so your administrator needs a broad skill set to understand the infrastructure behind the SharePoint farm. Otherwise, you end up running into issues where you can’t rely on them as a comprehensive administrator.

3. An Exceptional Awareness of Daily, Weekly, and Monthly Activities and Responsibilities
SharePoint admins have a long list of duties that they’re responsible for to keep SharePoint applications stable and optimized. The most common tasks they need to handle include monitoring server, web applications, sites and content databases, verifying patch updates, and applying patches on time to ensure the servers are synced in all environments.

4. Strong Grasp of SharePoint Out-of-the-Box Features
SharePoint administrators may need some time to get up-to-speed on any of the custom features you put into your applications, but they shouldn’t need any help understanding the out-of-the-box ones. The primary advantage to having an admin who knows this information already is that they’re capable of addressing end-user requests with the right features and best practices.

5. Master-level Skill with PowerShell
PowerShell proficiency is a must-have with your SharePoint administrators. This tool is what they should turn to when they need to perform or automate their work duties. A SharePoint administrator without PowerShell experience has a lower productivity level, which makes it difficult to optimize your operations.

6. Good at Agile Methodology and SCRUM Software Development Processes
Software development teams working with SharePoint typically use Agile and SCRUM methodology for their projects. Your SharePoint administrators should understand the framework and common processes used with these methodologies. They’ll have an easier time communicating with the teams, as well as helping build the right solutions for their needs.

7. Great Communicator and Learner
Great communication makes a world of difference when you’re trying to drive end user adoption on a product. SharePoint administrators also need to be willing to learn new things to keep up with drastic changes in on-premises and cloud solutions of SharePoint.

SharePoint is a critical part of your infrastructure in your organization. You need the right people capable of fulfilling their administrative duties and helping your company leverage SharePoint for business growth. Make sure that you keep this list of qualities handy when you’re interviewing potential admins.

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