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SharePoint has been a great success and can now be found in most companies throughout the United States and the world.  With this great success have come great challenges. Now an organization might have thousands of sites, each with its own set of needs. The issue is how does one manage such a proliferation of content in an effective manner. This has been on my mind recently and in fact I am doing a session at the SHARE conference in April in Atlanta on this very topic (http://www.shareconference.com/us). Sure, there are lots of tools out there to handle deleting sites and handling permissions but there is one point that is so often overlooked.

Technical Knowledge <> Business Knowledge

Or for the more technically inclined of you technical knowledge != business knowledge

So, how do we solve that problem? We enable the administrative assistants that have a firm grasp of the business functions in their particular part of the organization. The main reason this doesn’t happen more often is that the technical side of most organizations are reluctant to give up “power”. There is still a lot of misunderstanding and fear between the two sides, but the reality is that the two are growing ever closer. SharePoint is responsible for a lot of that gap closing. With a little bit of training, users can accomplish a wide variety of tasks that used to be reserved for highly specialized individuals. Take for example, a web enabled purchase request form. A few years ago, this would have required a programmer days (if not weeks) to create. Now with SharePoint, InfoPath, and some training a lot of people could get one up and running in a few hours. Of course, that is if you had the business knowledge to begin with.

But one of the real benefits of enabling the admin, is that they can handle the burden of permissions or at least a large part of it. Some dude sitting in IT generally has no idea if Brad from accounting needs access to last quarters orders folder, but the admin generally knows. SharePoint makes it easy to cordon off sites and hand over the permissions issues to an individual or group of individuals without handing over the keys to the kingdom.

The key point I am trying to make is that if you spend some time training your admins you can reap great rewards in making your end users happier and taking some of the burden off your IT staff. This is truly an example of a win-win situation.