SharePoint Development Blog by Jeremy Thake in Perth, Australia - Microsoft Infrastructure Administrators need to face the facts…SharePoint is here to stay!

Microsoft Infrastructure Administrators need to face the facts…SharePoint is here to stay!

May 22, 2009

I have been on the Microsoft Partner Services training for Collaboration and Portal technology for two days presented by Ian Morrish from MCS NZ. @IMorrish is well known in the community for http://www.wssdemo.com/ .

One thing that just niggled at me over the two days was the massive pressure that is on SharePoint Architects’ to take responsibility not only for SharePoint as a Platform but also for all the underlying technology stack. I’ve discussed this before, but it just rang loud and clear after hearing Ian speak. Ian is a walking SharePointPedia for all things Infrastructure as well as an amazing depth of knowledge in the SharePoint Platform across the board.

Before I start, this is not a blanket claim on all Administrators as I know there are some out there who are doing this already ;-)

The current certification is a joke as it breaks it into “admins” and “developers”. This really needs to be broken down more clearly into specific areas of the platform. To follow up on the last post having some more time to think about it, there are a lot of current “admins” out there in organisations who just simply don’t take on board SharePoint.

This broad brush of “admins” in my opinion includes SQL DBA’s, Backup specialists, Operations, Virtualisation specialists, ISA specialists, Active Directory specialists, …
Essentially, if you are an administrator in the Microsoft Technology stack and aren’t across SharePoint administration you are doing yourself no favours or the Architects!
It shouldn’t be up to a SharePoint Architect to give explicit instructions to a DBA on how to setup up SQL for SharePoint, or to have to point them to a White Paper to prove why you need AD service accounts for your SharePoint farm, or to tell AD guys how to configure Kerberos, or to tell Backup specialists what is required. Typically SharePoint Architects will only go away to TechNet and read the white papers and communicate this to the particular people in those roles…so why can’t these roles take the intuition to do this themselves? It is way to much knowledge for one person to take on!

I think it is time now to take SharePoint seriously within your role as an Microsoft Administrator. Part of this push needs to come by a certification for admins to take that focuses on these areas. They don’t need to know SharePoint inside out, but it’d be great if they understood how it affects the area they are responsible for e.g. SQL, AD, ISA, Hyper-V etc.

Where does the community go from here? Commments below please…

Comments

Friday, 22 May 2009 03:52 by Michael
Not quite understood from your post if SharePoint Architects should be admin, or admins be Architects?! What's wrong when Architect instruct local admins what exactly should be set up and how?! Never had any issues doing that across all my clients

Friday, 22 May 2009 04:34 by mainfram
I think the point you have raised applies to software architecture in general. Architects do need to understand a wide range of technologies is general and provide support to everyone involved, from developers, to DBAs and end users. I think that is what Architecture is all about. With respect to Sharepoint, I think the Sharepoint stack is overly complicated for what Sharepoint actually does. So with an Architect hat on, I agree that specialists out there should learn about software running on their infrastructure. However, overly complex architecture such as one implemented by Sharepoint will always need to be handled by Sharepoint specialists. One of the great lessons I've learned over the years is that great software architecture is simple, Sharepoint architecture isn't and so there is a price to pay.

Friday, 22 May 2009 05:16 by Richard Harbridge
From my perspective the masters and architect certifications for SharePoint cover this (unless I am mistaken). I think it's important to seperate ADMINISTRATOR and ARCHITECT. These are completely and wholly different roles. In some organizations they may be accomplished by the same person due to resource limitations and overall size of the organization, but typically these are/should be seperated (often into multiple people). I think the problem (IMO) isn't the certifications but the overall 'roles' required and influenced by SharePoint not being articulated properly by Microsoft. Aside from governance documents I don't even think there is sufficient documentation around setting up roles and responsibilities with SharePoint. Your thoughts on this Jeremy? Richard Harbridge

Friday, 22 May 2009 06:11 by JD Wade
Jeremy, As a former general infrastructure engineer/admin, I think you may be over simplifying this problem. I believe you are asking administrators who are responsible for the infrastructure of many applications to become experts in all the applications which is not reasonable (SharePoint is not the only appication that uses their infrastructure). I would equate this to saying that because desktops utilize your SharePoint platform, you should be a complete expert on all aspects of desktops including desktop security, all current hardware developments, etc. I think this would be unreasonable as well. Just my opinion on the matter which everyone has one.

Wednesday, 3 Jun 2009 10:24 by Mike Hansford
Are you calling developers architects? That's at least how it seems to me. I think it's important to make a distinction between the two. I also agree that admins need to be taking a responsibility for the admin stuff. I spend at least as much of my time administering SharePoint (including patches!) than actually building solutions.

Thursday, 4 Jun 2009 02:16 by Jeremy Thake
@mikeHansford - Actually if you read it again, you'll see I talk about architects and also the fact that Microsoft only distinguishes between admins and devs. I agree with you too, Devs are by no means architects.