Essential Skills That Every SharePoint Consultants Should Possess

We all know that Microsoft SharePoint helps in document storage and collaboration and helps companies manage, organize and share documents with others easily. Today, it is considered to be the top business collaboration platform, as most enterprise employees use it. With more and more businesses migrating to SharePoint, the demand for experienced SharePoint consultants are also increasing and companies have to ensure that their IT teams are well prepared and have the expertise to customize and manage the highly technical platform.

So, if you are looking for an expert SharePoint consulting firm, then it is very important that your consultant should be familiar with some of the best practices and also have an urge for learning new technology. Having worked as a SharePoint consultant, I have identified some of the skills that I have mentioned below, so that you can make it a part of your selection criteria:

Follow a Service Delivery Methodology:

A successful SharePoint consultant should always follow a service delivery, which means clear understanding, defining and also maintaining business ownership of the solutions. Similar to ERP and CRM solutions, SharePoint implementation must follow a proper methodology to maximize the customer engagement and revenue to ensure proper delivery.  Analysis, design and development, deployment, operation should always be a part of the methodology that is used by a consultant whether they follow a traditional SDLC or an Agile approach and framework to deliver the services. The methodology should be scalable, modular, systematic, repeatable and highly industry focused.

Understanding of SharePoint “Out of the Box” Features:

Since custom development is possible in SharePoint, it should be kept reserved for some specific circumstances and done only after thorough evaluation of SharePoint capabilities that include Out of the Box features, SharePoint Designer, MS cloud applications and 3^rd party tools. The consultants should have the expertise to leverage the existing features of the platform to satisfy customer needs. Some important features that SharePoint offers out of the box are:

·         Content management

·         Business intelligence

·         Social computing

·         Search

·         Identity management

·         Branding

Have the Ability to Integrate Other MS Cloud Service

Microsoft is building an ecosystem of cloud based services that can offer support to both your SharePoint and Office 365 environment. Here are some of the cloud applications that come with Office 365 licenses:

·         Yammer

·         MS power apps

·         MS flow

·         MS planner

·         MS teams

Your SharePoint development Consultant should have the capability to identify which collaboration tool can help you to increase your business productivity and also put the employees into action.

Capacity to Create Custom Solutions:

When customer requirements cannot be met with the out of the box features, then it is important that the SharePoint development team is able to create a custom or hybrid solution using the SharePoint framework for example REST/OData endpoints, Client Object Model, Server Object Model and etc. These methodologies and skills are crucial for the success of SharePoint implementation and should also be the core criteria before selecting the consultation team.

Ability to Manage Large Document Libraries:

The most vital usage of SharePoint is proper storage of large number of documents and this can only be done after a successful SharePoint installation. Your team should be able to set up your document libraries via the libraries, meta data, folder structures, team store sets so that you can easily find your data later when you need that the most.

Also Read: The Contributions of SharePoint BI in Business

Good Knowledge of Third Party Tools:

Your SharePoint consultant should always know how to resolve any issues and achieve the best desired results. They should have good knowledge of a wide range of third party products so that it saves time from reinventing the wheel and get the best solution faster. They should know about Nintex, AvePoint, Sharegate and etc.

As SharePoint is increasingly becoming popular and the roles and responsibilities are also increasing based on the needs of the organization, it is important that the consultant you hire should follow some best practices and have skills in project management and administration.