I keep finding myself standing in front of the mirror and no matter how hard I concentrate I cannot seem to split my atoms and create a clone of myself. While this is an extreme thought, it seems to be a fairly common thread when I am out in the field meeting with SharePoint administrators. The unprepared SharePoint team can easily become overwhelmed by the system. I wanted to take some of the time I normally dedicate to writing articles and dig into what is happening out there and what you and your organization can do to avoid this situation.

Over the past few years, SharePoint administrators seem to be plucked from the Active Directory, Exchange, Web administration and application development groups. I have found an amazing correlation between the administrator and the person(s) in your organization who are constantly trying to stretch the bounds of what is possible. Unfortunately, the truth is that these are also the folks who are relied on to solve the most critical issues when it comes to both your infrastructure and general health of your environment. Therefore we have reached the crux of the problem: how an organization clones its administrator before they quit or burn out.

The first and foremost issue that must be realized is that for most organizations, SharePoint is growing by leaps and bounds. I have met with a number of IT organizations that are being mandated, if not bypassed, to bring additional capacity and functionality online. It is time to take a stand and build your business case to slow the growth so that your organization can stop making some of the most common mistakes. I have a list of these mistakes and some directions for resolving them.

• SharePoint security is handled by a single resource
• Ownership of content is ill-defined
• Administration is a part-time job
• Quotas are set without analysis
• My Sites is enabled as a first-phase feature
• Backups are not being defined and managed
• Recovery is not fully tested or understood
• SharePoint features and components are all set to a single account