A SharePoint Architect is more of a horizontal profession in SharePoint, whereby, their forte comes from the wide knowledge they have in SharePoint. On the contrary, they have less expertise in the field. Nevertheless, an Architect in Sharepoint must have a deep understanding of the program. This includes the administration, functions and development of SharePoint.
They should also know how and when new web parts/components should be developed for SharePoint. These professionals are expected to compare several options and select the most relevant that will solve a certain need. These architects take care of Microsoft Technologies such as .NET 3.5, Exchange, C#, Office 2007/2010, ISS, Active Directory and the entire infrastructure. Generally, they hold the fundamental specialized role in SharePoint.
Roles Of a SharePoint Architect
This professional will be responsible for:
• Configuring and maintenance of document libraries, WSS site collections and lists as well as deploy SharePoint at the project level in a disseminated global environment.
• Execute standard administrative activities like to restore, backup, user issue resolution and site creation.
• Offer procedural know-how in evaluating, recognizing and developing efficient measures and system configurations that will solve a business need.
• Take part in collecting and documenting non-technical business users’ requirements.
• Generate practical design documents and alter the requirements of the business into a system requirements, generate a sample of suggested solutions, create Demo for the users and Applying the Solution C.
• Informing the clients and the Development Crew on theoretical and Comprehensive Design.
Requirements Of a SharePoint Architect
Despite of the role that an architect in SharePoint is expected to execute, there are some specific requirements that they must have. They are expected to have:
• A wide understanding of SharePoint: They should comprehend the building blocks of SharePoints. These include Virtual Directories, ASP.NET, AD and IIS.
• Knowledge of what functionality SharePoint can offer. They must also know the available types of configurations, the functionality restrictions and what Out Of The Box can offer.
• Enough understanding in performance monitoring and capacity planning.
• Understand the advanced features of SharePoint: These include Business Intelligence and FAST. These specialists should also know the required license in order to employ the features.
• They should know how to incorporate with other systems.
• They must have good documentation and communication skills.
• The specialists must also have the approaches to Best Practice in finding a SharePoint strategy and other standard tasks such as Migration.
These Architects are deeply involved in the planning phase of your SharePoint operation and they majorly focus on achieving the objective of the business. They achieve this by applying best practice methods and constructing appropriate plans. These plans will be achieved by the SharePoint Administrator or Developer. They play a major role in wrapping up the life-cycle of your system. This entails responding and prescaling of RFPs, predict a follow up job and designing possible solutions.
Your system will have plumbers and bricklayers, who are ready to construct, without having a blueprint and approval of the plan. A SharePoint Architect will therefore help in constructing a plan for your system and getting the relevant configurations that will suit your organization.
