SharePoint became widely popular in the last couple of years and is being used for various business needs like document management, team sites, project sites and collaboration portals. With SharePoint 2010 bringing in major improvements in social networking, search and business insights, it is predicted to become the most widely used collaboration platform in the industry. SharePoint environments, sites, databases and users are growing rapidly. As a result, SharePoint support needs are growing and IT teams have to spend bulk of their time and energy in SharePoint support than focusing on application solutions.

SharePoint support and maintenance

1. Level 2 and Level 3 User Support:

The following are the sample cases of servicing user requests and queries:

• Assist site administrators.
• Create or change workflow.
• Create site hierarchies, create a new site, add members to the site or change the look and feel.
• Upload new site templates.
• Create new document library or grant/revoke permission on the same.

2. Troubleshooting Issues:

SharePoint provides lot of out of the box features and allows users to manage simple tasks themselves. Sometimes when users change settings or create a new site or workflow; it does not work the way they want it to. The offshore team can help users in troubleshooting such cases. Following are some of the examples:

• Workflow is not working.
• Alert/notification is configured, but user does not receive notification.
• User accidentally deleted a document and needs to restore it.

3. SharePoint Server / Server Farm Support:

Provide support for SharePoint Server activities such as:

• Change/configuration management.
• Configuration of index server.
• Configuration of Shared Service Provider
• Maintaining and checking the event logs.
• SharePoint related patches and hot fixes.

4. User Profile Management:

Manage user profiles and security across multiple SharePoint sites.

• Create user profiles and define roles
• Provide authentication/authorization
• Grant/revoke permissions to different users/roles.
• Password reset

5. Site Governance:

Manage and monitor governance policies and processes for SharePoint sites and address following issues:

• Site/library quota management
• Site expiration
• Handling unused sites
• Dealing with blocked file types

6. Site Maintenance:

On-going maintenance of different SharePoint sites. Following are some of the examples:

• Archive obsolete content and sites
• Remove permissions of users who have left or transferred
• Mail notification and alert issues
• Configure Search Scope, Crawl Rules, Search Keywords

7. Database Maintenance:

Database maintenance tasks such as monitoring database size, regular database backups and recovery.