There is much confusion and disagreement in the industry about who does what in SharePoint and what to call everyone. There is also the perception that one person can do it all. Nothing could be further from the truth. There are many roles required to manage this enormous platform and it takes an army of people to successfully implement and adopt SharePoint.

End Users, Site Owners, Site Collection Administrators and Evangelists are actually all referred to as End Users or Power Users in the industry as they operate on the front-end of the platform. Everyone else is Support Staff in one way or another working on a server or coding level.

Every company will ultimately be different, but these are the overall purposes of the most common positions (within my client base):

User / End User – a user in a business role, no interest in another technology, only uploads or updates documents.

Site Owner – to manage and administer the team / project documentation, information and communication on; and access to, a team site and subsites.

Site Collection Administrator – to manage and administer a site collection for a division.

Helpdesk Administrator – to support all users on the platform.

Farm Administrator – to maintain, manage and report on the farm web, application, index, query and database servers in accordance with best practices.

Evangelist – the public face of SharePoint in the organisation; to demo and evangelise SharePoint to effect good user adoption; to provide specialized application consulting services with regards to infrastructure and web content management services provided by SharePoint.

Architect – technical team lead architecting topology and scalability of farm; (can also be the operational, day to day decision maker on the running of the platform if there is no fulltime person for this in the organisation).

Download the full job descriptions here.

I ran the content of the job descriptions past my clients and colleagues, thanks for the input guys.

As you can see from the samples, the tasks performed by each of the posts varies significantly. Hopefully these descriptions will help you create and motivate for the Dream Team required to manage your platform. This list is by no means complete. There are also Ops Managers, Developers, Information Managers, Knowledge Managers, Content Managers, Consultants, Trainers, Project Managers, Graphics Designers, etc. You need all of these people to run a successful implementation in a large organisation.

I’ve also been asked what each of these people should be earning.  At the risk of getting killed by the rest of the community, I am going to decline to comment on that.  I can suggest contacting recruitment agencies to see what they are placing resources at.  All I can say, is experience counts alot!  Just because someone has done all the courses, does not mean they are able to run the platform.  Ask the right questions.

Remember too that SharePoint is an operational system and it is important that someone is able to make calls on a daily basis on matters affecting the platform. Leaving this to a monthly governance forum is not going to be sufficient as critical issues may not be able to wait that long. The Operational Manager can be referred to as many things including Project Sponsor, Project Manager, Architect, Intranet Manager, etc. It doesn’t matter as long as that person has the authority to make decisions instantly and whose authority is recognized by the team.

For some guidance on how to become a SharePoint Architect, Developer, Power User, Trainer, WCM Expert or User Group Team Lead, check out the I Wanna Be section on Information Worker.