SharePoint Tech Dives ™ Community tips, tricks, and best practices on SharePoint related technologies

The Evolution of the SharePoint Professional

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to how SharePoint 2010 is reshaping the future and the impact it will have on those of us who’ve been implementing and developing for SharePoint over the last several years. I look forward to dedicating a bit more time to this subject in a future post. The following is just a brief abstract of my thoughts regarding one of the areas that I feel will be affected the most, our roles.

MS has been making a lot of distinct references between what they call IT Pros (I’m not sure I agree with this term) and Developers in most of their SharePoint 2010 sites, presentations, and documentation. We’ve experienced the logical evolution of these 2 roles for several years, but for many of us, the line has remained somewhat gray. I suspect this to drastically change in the near future, and most who haven’t chosen to specialize in a specific track really need to start thinking about choosing a side, or risk getting overshadowed by experts coming from either direction. Of course regardless of what track you choose, you should dedicate time to learn at least the fundamentals of the other.

I suspect SharePoint will continue evolving to become the de facto web operating platform for companies and corporations world wide. If you think of the role Windows plays for each of the users in your company, and then think of your users as a collective; it shouldn't be too difficult to visualize SharePoint as your companies OS on the web. Now consider the teams and roles that take part in managing, developing, and supporting Windows, along with all of the applications it runs in your company or corporation. How many all around experts are there. The division is not just technical in nature, there are several business aspects to it as well…ever heard the term "Segregation of Duties". Suddenly "IT Pros" and "Developers" may not even seem like enough roles.

Reference: http://blog.rafelo.com/2009/11/evolution-of-sharepoint-professional.html