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SharePoint has many different types of users, and depending on where your role fits in, you might have a very different experience from a fellow SharePoint user. For example, you might be assigned to create and administer a SharePoint website for your team. In this case, you might see first-hand the vast functionality of SharePoint websites. On the other hand, you might be a user of a SharePoint site. In this case, your SharePoint world might be only the site that someone has already created for you. To confuse matters even further, many organizations will roll out SharePoint and give it a spiffy internal name; for example, “Connect.” So even though the cool new web tool called Connect is actually SharePoint, most users don’t even realize it!

On the more technical side, if you’re an infrastructure administrator, you see SharePoint as a platform capable of offloading the difficult job of website administration. If you’re a software developer, you see SharePoint as a web platform for developing programs for users.

The vastness of SharePoint creates areas of specialization. The result is that a person’s view of SharePoint is greatly affected by how that person uses the product. It’s important to keep this in mind when talking with people about SharePoint. If you ask ten people to define SharePoint, you’re likely to get ten different answers, as illustrated in Figure 1-8.

FIGURE 1-8: There are many different ways to define SharePoint.

SharePoint has many different administration levels, and each requires a different level of technical ability. For example, if you’re comfortable working with software like Microsoft Word and Excel, then you won’t have any problem administering a SharePoint site. At a deeper level, there are also SharePoint infrastructure administrators. To administer SharePoint at the infrastructure level is a role that falls squarely into the realm of the IT geeks.

SharePoint is a platform, so the user roles an organization defines depend on the organization itself. Here are some examples of the possible roles of users in SharePoint:

 Anonymous visitors: People who browse to a website that just happens to be using the SharePoint platform. Anonymous visitors just see SharePoint as a website and nothing else.

 SharePoint visitors: People who browse to the site and authenticate so that SharePoint knows who they are. Visitors might still just see a SharePoint site as any other website, except they notice their name in the top-right corner of the screen and know they must log in to reach the site. Visitors might not use any of the features of SharePoint, however, and just browse the information posted to the website.

 SharePoint casual users: People who know all the company documents are posted to SharePoint and know they can upload their own documents to their personal SharePoint site. Casual users might realize that they are using SharePoint, or they might just think of the platform as the name the organization has given to SharePoint. For example, we have seen organizations give their web platform tool names such as Source or Smart or Knowledge Center. SharePoint is the name of the web platform product from Microsoft, which is often unknown by users of a tool built on the SharePoint platform.

 SharePoint users: People who are familiar with SharePoint and its main features. SharePoint users often perform various administrator functions even if they don’t realize it. For example, they might be responsible for an app that stores all the company policies and procedures. Thus, they are an app administrator. Users might also be responsible for a site for a small team, in which case they are site administrators. As you can see, a user can play many different roles.

 SharePoint power users: Power users are not only familiar with the main SharePoint features and functionality but also dive deeper. Power users might be familiar with the functionality differences of different features, routing documents using workflows, and building site hierarchies. Power users might also be a site collection administrator and thus responsible for a collection of sites.

 SharePoint technical administrators: Technical administrators are people from the IT department who are responsible for SharePoint. Technical administrators are less concerned with using SharePoint for business and more concerned about making sure the platform is available and responsive. An administrator might play many different roles. For example, farm administrators are responsible for all the servers that make up SharePoint, such as web front end servers, applications servers, and database servers. Specialized database administrators focus just on the database components. There are even administrative roles for specific services, such as the search service or user profile service. Depending on the size of the SharePoint implementation, these technical administrator roles might be filled by a single overworked individual or a team with highly specialized skills.