What does SharePoint administrator training cover?
SharePoint administrator training covers the practical management of SharePoint sites, libraries and content, including permissions, security, governance, user access and configuration. It also typically includes administration best practice, troubleshooting, information architecture and ongoing platform maintenance.
SharePoint administrator training covers the operational, technical and strategic skills needed to run a SharePoint environment effectively. Alongside core site and access administration, a well-designed course explains how the platform is structured, how administrative tasks are carried out, how changes are controlled and how administrators monitor the environment over time.
Typical course content includes:
- Administrator roles and tools: the responsibilities of a SharePoint administrator, the relationship between SharePoint and the wider Microsoft 365 environment, and the purpose of the available administration centres and management interfaces.
- Tenant and site architecture: how sites, site collections, hub sites, workspaces and navigation structures relate to one another. Training may also cover planning a scalable structure before new sites are created.
- Site provisioning: creating sites from approved templates, applying standard settings, managing site ownership and controlling how new workspaces are requested and established.
- Content organisation: the use of columns, content types, views and metadata to make information easier to classify and find. Administrators learn how to avoid unnecessarily complex structures that make future management harder.
- Storage and lifecycle controls: monitoring storage use, identifying inactive or duplicated sites, and applying policies for reviewing, archiving or removing content in line with an organisation’s requirements.
- Compliance features: an introduction to retention labels, records management, audit information, legal holds and data loss prevention concepts where these are relevant to the organisation’s Microsoft 365 configuration.
- Automation and scripting: using repeatable processes to reduce manual administration. Depending on the course level, this may include PowerShell, standard templates, bulk actions and controlled workflow or automation scenarios.
- Search and discovery: configuring search experiences, understanding crawled and managed properties, and investigating why particular content may not appear as expected in search results.
- Monitoring and reporting: reviewing service health, usage reports, audit events, storage trends and administrative activity to identify issues or inform platform decisions.
- Change and release management: testing changes, documenting configuration decisions, communicating planned alterations and maintaining a consistent approach across development, test and live environments where those environments are used.
- Migration and integration considerations: assessing content before migration, mapping existing structures to SharePoint, identifying unsuitable data and considering how SharePoint works alongside other Microsoft 365 services.
Practical exercises are important because administration is not limited to knowing where a setting is located. Learners may be asked to create a controlled site structure, apply a template, review audit information, diagnose a search issue, test a lifecycle rule or produce a report from administrative data. These activities connect the theory to decisions an administrator must make in a live business environment.
The depth of training depends on the learner’s role. A site owner may need a focused introduction to provisioning, content structures and reporting, whereas a tenant administrator may require deeper work on compliance, scripting, monitoring, migration planning and change control. Training should therefore distinguish between day-to-day administration, platform ownership and specialist responsibilities rather than treating every learner as having the same needs.
Good training also explains the boundaries of SharePoint administration. It should make clear which tasks require broader Microsoft 365 administration, security or compliance input, when a change should be escalated, and how to document decisions for future administrators. This helps organisations develop a controlled operating model rather than relying on one person’s undocumented knowledge.
SharePoint administrator training should also cover how administrative requests are assessed and processed. Learners need to distinguish between routine tasks, such as updating a site owner, and changes that could affect access, records or the wider information structure. This involves confirming the request, checking authorisation, assessing the impact and recording the action taken.
Practical exercises may involve handling a new site request, reviewing whether the proposed purpose and ownership are suitable, applying the approved configuration and documenting the outcome. Training can also introduce request queues, approval records and administrative runbooks, helping different administrators apply the same standards and making completed work easier to review.
