Thoughts about being a SharePoint Administrator

In addition to being the new WordPress administrator, I’m also the new SharePoint admin for our project. I recently just got “Full Access” control over the current team site, but before I did I’ve been creating a demo site using my My Site. (And, actually, even if I did have access to the other site, I probably would have created my demo site using my My Site anyway – there’s just less risk of someone stumbling across it and/or me doing something screwy to someone else’s documents.)

The funny part is, I actually kind of like all this SharePoint stuff. At my last job, we were implementing SharePoint as an enterprise document management and collaboration system, for a very large company. Well, I’m only implementing an instance of a SharePoint site for a specific project, but once the word gets out that I know what I’m doing I’ll probably end up redesigning the SharePoint sites for the rest of the company. I guess the difference is that “enterprise” for my old job meant a 50,000+ employee base, not including contractors. At my new job, and for this instance of SharePoint, it’s for about 60 people. Big difference.

I think some of the reasons why I don’t mind it so much are: a) I do know what I’m doing and; b) I get to design it all my way. SharePoint can really get out of hand if you don’t have a clue about what to do, and it’s easy to get caught up in the endless maze of subsites and submenus. However, I’m finding that having a grip on the SharePoint, admin back-end makes getting a clear picture of what needs to be done and knowing how best to take care of it, a fulfilling task.