Duties and Responsibilities of a SharePoint Specialist
As a Sharepoint specialist, you play an important role enabling collaboration and knowledge sharing within an organization. You are responsible for designing, developing, and maintaining Sharepoint sites that serve as an intranet portal. This includes configuring site collections, web applications, and security settings to meet business needs. You build custom solutions, integrate third-party apps, and provide end-user support to maximize the effectiveness of Sharepoint. Strong technical, analytical, and communication skills are required to be successful in this position. If you enjoy working with cutting-edge technologies and enabling productivity, a career as a Sharepoint specialist could be very rewarding. The following details the primary duties and responsibilities associated with this position.
Duties and Responsibilities of a Sharepoint Specialist.
Below are the Duties and Responsibilities of a Sharepoint Specialist.
Understanding the Role of a SharePoint Specialist
As a SharePoint specialist, you are responsible for designing, developing, and supporting SharePoint solutions and sites. Your duties include:
Providing Administration and Support
You will administer and support SharePoint environments, including installing patches and upgrades. You monitor sites and solutions to ensure optimal performance and security. You also troubleshoot issues and provide technical support to end users.
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Developing Solutions and Customizations
You will customize SharePoint sites and build solutions to meet business needs. This includes creating web pages, building custom lists and libraries, developing workflows, designing dashboards and reports, integrating with other systems, and branding sites. You stay up-to-date with the latest SharePoint updates to utilize new features.
Promoting Governance and Best Practices
You establish and enforce SharePoint governance policies and best practices. This helps ensure sites remain consistent, secure, and accessible. You provide guidance on folder structures, metadata, permissions, and more. You may also create training materials and conduct training sessions for content authors and site owners.
Collaborating with Stakeholders
You work with managers, content authors, and site owners to understand their needs and requirements. You gather input to determine the best way to configure sites and solutions to support key business processes. You also provide status updates, document solutions, and train others on how to properly use and maintain the sites you build.
In summary, as a SharePoint specialist you play an important role enabling collaboration and productivity through the effective use of SharePoint technologies. By providing administration, developing solutions, promoting governance, and collaborating with stakeholders, you help empower users and support key business objectives.
Key Duties of a SharePoint Specialist
As a SharePoint specialist, you will have several key duties and responsibilities to fulfill.
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Administering the SharePoint Environment
You will be in charge of managing and monitoring the SharePoint environment, including setting up sites, libraries, lists, and templates. This includes configuring permissions and security settings to control access. You will also maintain the health and performance of the SharePoint infrastructure by troubleshooting issues, installing updates, and optimizing configurations.
Developing SharePoint Solutions
SharePoint specialists are often tasked with building custom solutions, applications, and web parts to extend SharePoint’s out-of-the-box capabilities. This could include creating custom forms, workflows, dashboards, or integrations with other systems. You may utilize tools like Visual Studio, SharePoint Designer, PowerApps, and Power Automate to develop these solutions.
Providing User Support
As the resident SharePoint expert, you will likely field questions and provide support to end users. This includes assisting users with any issues they encounter, training them on SharePoint features, and helping implement best practices. You should have excellent communication skills and patience in order to provide friendly, helpful support to users with varying levels of technical proficiency.
Maintaining and Improving SharePoint
To ensure a quality user experience, you need to regularly maintain, update, and optimize the SharePoint environment. This includes monitoring site collections for issues, reviewing usage analytics to determine improvements, updating web parts and solutions, and planning and testing upgrades. You should keep up with the latest SharePoint updates and features so you can determine how best to apply them in your organization.
In summary, SharePoint specialists have a range of technical and non-technical responsibilities that require both a breadth and depth of SharePoint knowledge as well as soft skills like communication, problem-solving, and project management. With the proper training and experience, you can have a successful career as a SharePoint specialist.
Daily and Weekly Responsibilities
As a SharePoint specialist, you will have daily and weekly responsibilities to keep the system running smoothly.
Monitoring and Troubleshooting
On a daily basis, you should log in to check that SharePoint is functioning properly. Monitor site usage, storage limits, and performance. Troubleshoot any issues that arise and work to resolve them. This could include recycle bin overages, storage quota warnings, or performance degradation. You want to ensure maximum uptime and availability of the SharePoint environment.
Managing Permissions and Security
You are responsible for granting and restricting access to sites, libraries, lists, and documents. Review requests from users to share or restrict content. Determine appropriate permission levels based on your organization’s security protocols. Permissions include full control, contribute, read, and restricted read. Monitor for any unauthorized access and make changes as needed.
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Backing Up and Restoring Data
It is critical to back up the SharePoint environment on a regular schedule in case of system issues or failures. You should perform full backups weekly and differential backups daily. Validate that backups are completing successfully. Be prepared to restore data, sites, libraries or entire SharePoint deployments from backup files if needed. Practice restoring to ensure the integrity of backups.
Answering Questions and Providing Support
Expect to respond to questions and support requests from SharePoint users. You may need to troubleshoot issues, provide guidance on best practices, or train new users. Aim for prompt and helpful responses to support the productivity of your colleagues. Issue resolution and training are integral parts of keeping SharePoint running optimally.
Planning and Documentation
Take time each week to review the SharePoint roadmap and plan for upcoming changes or new features. Update documentation including permission levels, backup schedules, site templates in use, and key configurations. Well-documented systems are easier to maintain and support. Keep documentation up to date as changes are made.
Long-Term Projects and Initiatives
As a Sharepoint Specialist, you will likely be involved in various long-term projects and initiatives to enhance and optimize your organization’s Sharepoint environment. These types of engagements typically span multiple months and require extensive planning and management.
Migration and Upgrade Projects
Migrating data, applications and sites to a new version of Sharepoint is a common long-term project. This involves planning the migration, testing the new environment, scheduling downtime, migrating content, and ensuring everything is functioning properly post-migration. Upgrading to the latest version of Sharepoint also takes significant time and resources to implement successfully.
Custom Development Initiatives
Creating custom applications, workflows, sites, and features tailored to your organization’s specific needs may be an ongoing responsibility. This requires gathering requirements from stakeholders, designing solutions, building and testing applications, and deploying new functionality. Ongoing enhancements and updates to custom elements are often needed as well.
Information Architecture Overhauls
Redesigning your Sharepoint information architecture includes reorganizing sites, content, metadata, and navigation to improve the findability and accessibility of information. This demands analyzing how people currently interact with Sharepoint, identifying areas for improvement, and implementing a new taxonomy and content structure. It also involves migrating and re-categorizing a large volume of content.
Adoption and Governance Campaigns
Driving Sharepoint adoption and improving governance are continuous endeavors at many organizations. Things like creating training materials, running educational campaigns, defining and enforcing policies, and auditing Sharepoint usage require an ongoing time commitment to be effective. Maximizing the business value of Sharepoint through high adoption and governance is a long-term objective for Sharepoint specialists and administrators.
Through long-term Sharepoint projects and initiatives like these, you can have a significant impact on optimizing and transforming how your organization leverages Sharepoint to achieve its goals. By taking the time to properly plan and manage these types of long-term engagements, you will be well positioned to deliver successful outcomes.
Required Skills and Qualifications
To be successful as a SharePoint Specialist, you must have a specific set of skills and qualifications.
Technical Skills
You should have a degree in computer science, information technology, or a related field. Proficiency with SharePoint software and Microsoft Office 365 is essential. You must be highly skilled with:
- SharePoint site creation, configuration, and customization
- Document management and web content management
- Workflow automation and process improvement
- Permission and security management
You should stay up-to-date with the latest versions and features of SharePoint and related Microsoft products.
Soft Skills
Excellent communication, both written and verbal, is key. You need to be able to translate complex technical concepts into easy to understand language for non-technical colleagues and clients. Strong organizational and time-management skills are also important to keep projects on schedule. You should be detail-oriented, able to multitask, and adept at problem-solving to resolve any issues that may arise.
Experience
Most SharePoint Specialist roles require 2-5 years of relevant work experience. You could gain valuable experience through internships, entry-level roles, or work on your own SharePoint projects. Microsoft certifications in areas like SharePoint administration and development can also help demonstrate your competence to employers.
To excel as a SharePoint Specialist, continuously improving your skills and keeping up with advancements in SharePoint and related Microsoft technologies is essential. With the right technical, soft, and practical skills and experience, you can have a successful career optimizing SharePoint environments and enabling collaboration and productivity.
Conclusion
In summary, a SharePoint specialist plays an integral role in any organization that leverages Microsoft SharePoint. From designing and configuring SharePoint sites to managing content and security, a SharePoint specialist helps enable collaboration and increase productivity. The job requires a unique blend of both technical and soft skills to be successful. If you enjoy working with technology, streamlining business processes, and enabling teamwork, a career as a SharePoint specialist could be very rewarding. The demand for these professionals is strong, and the opportunities for career growth in this field are promising. With hard work and continuous learning, you have the potential to become a leader in helping organizations maximize the benefits of SharePoint.
