SharePoint Consultants are in high demand today, businesses are looking forward to a way to manage and organize their content management system, and therefore, companies contact professional SharePoint development services.

SharePoint is a vast field, and many IT professionals are planning to work as the SharePoint expert. Various online courses and training sessions are available to get started.
Since SharePoint has a broader scope; therefore, it is completely up to you which field you want to choose e.g. SharePoint developer, SharePoint manager, SharePoint analyst or SharePoint consultant.

This blog particularly addresses all the essential skills that you need to be a SharePoint consultant. But, before diving deep into this, let’s explore what a SharePoint consultant does.

What Does a SharePoint Consultant Do?

The major role of a SharePoint consultant is to deliver the right codes and designs for various features based on the clients’ requirements.

Besides, a SharePoint Consultant also perform different roles including, architecture, configuration, maintenance of SharePoint technologies, preparation of SharePoint documentation and more.

SharePoint consultant is basically considered as the middleman who supports clients to get the maximum value of SharePoint by teaching them the ways to utilize SharePoint platform with its potential capabilities. SharePoint consultants solve problems and help organizations to run efficiently.

Core Skills Required for SharePoint Consultants

A few of the core skills that a SharePoint consultant should have are mentioned below:
• Ability to provide both oral and written SharePoint reports.
• Should be aware of the relevant data collection technology and techniques.
• Must be capable of interpreting and analyzing the received data.
• Should be a team player with a positive attitude and capable enough to train others in a professional manner.
• Familiarity with various software defect tracking methods.
• Strong command on quality standards and measurements.
• Familiarity with various programming languages.
• Should be proficient at using source control technology.

Most Common Responsibilities

The most common responsibilities of a SharePoint consultant are:

• Create and design SharePoint components
• Create, Implement and test basic system modules to support engineering functions
• Understanding the system and environment needs through strong research
• Outlining the scope, strategies, and deliverables related to the assigned basic projects.
• Collection of users technical requirements and analyze the gathered data to work on it.

• With proper supervision, a SharePoint consultant design tests and incorporate the basic integrated solution and the distributed computing solutions for clients.
• Monitors performance to identify system errors

Besides, the core responsibilities and basic skills, there are some other essential skills required to continue your career as a SharePoint consultant. Below are the seven must-have skills of a SharePoint consultant:

1. A Consistent Service Delivery Methodology

Successful SharePoint development services always work with a strong service delivery methodology. Service delivery methodology is important because of many reasons. It helps to increase customer engagement and also maximize ROI.

A SharePoint consultant must incorporate the following as a part of the service delivery methodology, Diagnostic, Analysis, Design, Development, Deployment, Operation phases.

Also, while designing your service delivery methodology, keep in mind that it should be organized, scalable, linked, and repeatable and industry-focused.

Such requirements are crucial because the SharePoint system can be utilized by wide-ranging customers. The system can be implemented for startups for basic collaboration needs, as well as it can work for a large enterprise to deploy a custom solution. Therefore, a consistent service delivery approach is essential.

1. Be Familiar with “Out of the Box” Features

SharePoint allows custom development; however, the consultant must be familiar with some default SharePoint features.

Out of the box, features are considered as the native functionality that is available in SharePoint.

Using out of the box features can get you various benefits such as:

• Pre-tested by QA professionals
• Lower chances to face problems while system upgrades
• Microsoft support is available

Some of the most useful Out of the box features are:

Content Management
Content management feature helps to share files, manages documents and records; it also supports office integration and custom contents.

Search
Provides high-level search options to help users in finding both internal and external items, documents and contents to SharePoint.

Business Intelligence
BI integrates multiple features to better create online dashboards for end-users. Some of the features include Excel Services, Visio services and much more.

Social Computing
Allows updated collaboration via blogs, forums, wiki pages and tagging.

Branding
It provides custom logos and themes to use for the SharePoint platform.

Identity Management
Provides a robust identity authentication via internal and external systems

1. In-depth Knowledge of SharePoint Designer SharePoint consultant should get knowledge related to SharePoint designer. Right now, there is no new version of SharePoint designer and still, the old version SharePoint Designer 2013, is supporting to customize and extend SharePoint Server 2016.

SharePoint Designer helps to create custom workflows for the SharePoint documents and site contents. It is a specialized HTML editor and web design program that integrates external business data into SharePoint and revamp the site pages with a modern look and feel.
It is essential for a SharePoint consultant to understand features of the SharePoint consultant because a lot of client needs can be achieved with SharePoint Designer.

1. Learn to Manage Documents
   A successful SharePoint consultant must have proper knowledge of how he can store and manage large document libraries in a way that each document can be found easily when needed.

2. Learn to Deploy Cloud MS Services
   Microsoft often introduces various services to support Office 365 and SharePoint. Some the Microsoft services are MS teams, MS flow, MS planner and much more.

A SharePoint consultant must learn how he can integrate such services to improve productivity. Also, first, he needs to identify a specific toolset that can be beneficial for the company’s SharePoint environment.

1. Be Familiar with Third-Party Tools
   There are various third-party tools available that help to achieve the client’s requirements. Therefore, a professional SharePoint consultant must comprise some knowledge related to third party tools; also, he needs to figure out when and how he can integrate such tools to fulfill user requirements. Some of the available third-party tools are AvePoint, Sharegate, Nintex.

2. Ability to Deploy Custom Solutions

A SharePoint consultant should be capable enough to deploy custom solutions when out of the box features get failed.

A SharePoint consultant should know about various alternatives to use when one gets flop. In case, if out of the box features are not working, then SharePoint consultant can also use different sources to create a custom/hybrid solution.

SharePoint consultants must know about the relevant APIs to create custom SharePoint solution in a SharePoint framework.