Filling the Management Roles

With the new SharePoint 2003 environment comes a number of new roles that need to be filled. It is helpful to understand the different roles required to administer a SharePoint 2003 environment and discuss who will fill these roles to be able to plan for the correct level of training for these individuals.

Although there are Administrator site groups, to perform any administrative tasks that affect settings for all SharePoint sites and virtual servers on the server computer, a user must be an administrator for the server computer or a member of the SharePoint administrators group rather than a member of an Administrator site group for a specific SharePoint site. Members of this domain group can perform central administration tasks without having to be given Administrator rights to the local server computer, which is useful in server farm environments. Many organizations create a dedicated AD group that contains the users with this level of responsibility. There are also, of course, additional management responsibilities to be assigned to ensure that the implementation continues running at peak efficiency and which should be discussed during the design phase:

• Managing security and additional settings The duties include managing the Web Part gallery, site template gallery, and list template gallery, as well as managing web discussions and storage space allocation for document libraries, documents, and lists.

• Managing alerts The organization should make decisions concerning the number of search alerts per site, number of other alerts per site, maximum number of search alerts per user, maximum number of other alerts per user, and maximum number of results per alert. One or more individuals should also be available to assist users with setting up alerts and using them responsibly, and troubleshooting any issues with alerts.

• Managing properties of crawled content The properties that can be searched are extensive and should be reviewed to make sure that they meet the needs of the organization. This is a more advanced level of planning, and the defaults can be used during the initial proof of concept and prototype phases, but they should be reviewed prior to full production implementation.

• Managing keywords Administrators create keywords for common searches and then add keyword Best Bets for each keyword, which are items most relevant to that search. Keywords are used to mark specific items as more relevant for a particular word included in the search so that they show up more prominently in search results.

• Managing profiles User profiles provide detailed information about individuals in the organization and can be imported from Active Directory services. An individual should manage the profiles, make sure that they are updated on a regular basis through connectivity with AD, and handle any issues with profiles.

• Managing audiences Audiences can be critical to the portal's functionality and should be monitored and kept up-to-date. Audience rules can be complex and can contain multiple conditions, so it helps to have an individual assigned to this responsibility, who is the central point of contact.

• Auditing site usage If usage analysis processing is configured, a site usage report will be available and can yield useful information about site collection usage, and one or more individuals should regularly review this information.

• Scheduling timed jobs Several features of Windows SharePoint Services rely on scheduled background processes. Table 5.4 lists the frequency at which timed operations can occur.

  Table 5.4. Scheduling Options for Timed Jobs

  Operation	Frequency	Scope
  Processing the usage analysis log files	Daily	Web server
  Sending alert notifications	Immediately, daily, or weekly	Content database
  Checking for and automatically deleting unused websites	Daily, weekly, or monthly	Content database unused websites
  Checking for and automatically adding email attachments from a specific public folder to a specific document library	Every few minutes, hourly, or daily	Content database

  
  

Note that scheduled times apply to all websites on a particular virtual server.

Additional High-Level Management Tasks

Some other key items that should be discussed during the design phase involve the skill set of the administrative staff. The staff needs to be able to perform the following tasks:

• Manage the SQL databases and available storage space.

• Back up and restore SharePoint 2003 sites and servers.

• Determine what needs to be audited.

• Monitor the SharePoint 2003 servers.

• Maintain the SharePoint 2003 servers.

• Set and manage quotas for sites.