SharePoint Admin Interview Questions - Latest Updated

1. What Is Sharepoint 2010?
Answer: SharePoint 2010 is the business collaboration platform for the Enterprise & the Web that enables you to connect & empower people through an integrated set of rich features. Whether deployed on-premises or as hosted services, SharePoint 2010 helps you cut costs with a unified infrastructure while allowing you to rapidly respond to your business needs. (SharePoint Admin Interview Questions)

2. What is Microsoft Windows Services?
Answer: Microsoft Windows Services is the engine that allows administrators to create Web sites for information sharing and document collaboration. Windows SharePoint Services provides additional functionality to the Microsoft Office System and other desktop applications, as well as serving as a platform for application development. SharePoint sites provide communities for team collaboration, enabling users to work together on documents, tasks, and projects. The environment for easy and flexible deployment, administration, and application development.

3. What are the advantages of Service Applications over SSP?
Answer: The key limitation of the SSP architecture was that it was configured by using a set of services, and all Web applications associated with the SSP bore the overhead of all the services even if they weren’t being used. To change the service configuration for a particular Web application, a new SSP would have to be created.

The service application architecture, on the other hand, allows a set of services to be associated with a given Web application and a different set of services to be associated with another Web application. Also, the same service application can be configured differently in different Web applications; therefore, Web sites can be configured to use only the services that are needed, rather than the entire bank of services.

4. What is the function of a content type in SharePoint?
Answer: Content type consists of the information or acts as a blueprint that has the reusability properties. This feature is included in the SharePoint to define the Meta information like metadata and its associated information and properties. It acts as an extension to the SharePoint program and consists of the list of the types that are present. It is also used to make the list portable for use throughout the instance of the type by using the instantiation process. It is used to set the content type as location independent. Multiple content types can exist together in one document library and the setting of the document library becomes enabled. It will have access to the list form pages, workflows, templates, and custom wrote functionality. The content type is important to all the deciding of the different types of contents that are used in Sharepoint.

5. Why is it required to use a sandbox solution in SharePoint?
Answer: The sandbox solution allows easy deployable and reusable packages to be used that consist of features, site definitions, and many more functionalities. The sandbox solution can be enabled and disabled manually by going and changing from the settings. The solution can be deployed on the server. The sandbox allows the restriction to be put where the execution of the environment allows certain resources to be enabled and kept into the sandbox without affecting the rest of the server. Sandbox solutions can’t affect the whole server as they are not used to deploy at the administrative level. It can be deployed on a site with the administrator permissions using the site collection. Only the administrator is allowed to configure the sandboxed solutions that are related to settings like load balancing, tiers, quotas and resource points, etc.

6. What are Solutions?
Answer: Solutions are the container packages for Features. The solution basically, is a cabinet (.cab) file with extension .wsp which contains various components needed to be deployed(features, web parts, custom forms, etc) along with files that describe some important metadata about those Components. Once a Solution is installed on a server in the farm, you can deploy it to any web application from your Solution Management. 

7. What is the latest version of SharePoint and explain its main features in brief?
Answer: The latest version of SharePoint is SharePoint 2013. The main features of it are that it has improved performance, it provides new features for Business Connectivity Services (BCS), it supports Cross-Site publishing and an improved and better search with precise results. Also, they have made changes in the workflow architecture. It also provides a Design Manager which helps in publishing sites. SharePoint 2013 also provides office web app servers and have newly added social networking features. As everything is on mobile devices these days, they enable the user with an optimized user interface for mobile devices. It also has shredded BLOBs for storage. There were some issues in an older version which were having performance issues but now have been improved like distributed Cache service, minimal download strategy, and the shredded storage.

8. What is GAC in SharePoint?
Answer: The Global Assembly Cache contains assembly code or machine code which is used to run a program. It gives custom binaries place into full trust code groups. The binaries are deployed to be used between the sender and the receiver. After signing, the binary will have a public key identifier for itself so that it can be used by the sender and receiver. GAC can be used with .NET assemblies cache for the command line platform.

9. What is the concept of Content-Type in SharePoint?
Answer:
SharePoint is about Contents, so Content-Type is a reusable collection of settings and metadata to represents a certain type of content. For Instance, a Student Content-Type may have a set of metadata like Student Enrollment ID, Name, year of the enrollment, etc.

Content-Type in SharePoint facilitates to organize content in a more meaningful way. It supports inheritance of properties, behaviors, and appearances.

10. Do you have any additional experience and/or education which might enhance your status as a candidate?
Answer: Mention any on-job training you might have done, as well as any skills you might have learned from past experiences – describe these in detail to make them concrete for the interviewer. If you have any database experience or web development expertise, or anything relevant of this sort, mention it too.

11. What is Site collection?
Answer: SharePoint site collection is a logical grouping of multiple SharePoint sites or hierarchical site structure. E.g. Sites of various teams or departments of an organization can be grouped logically in one site collection. A site collection consists of a top-level site and one or more sites below it. Each top-level site and any sites below it in the site structure are based on a site template and can have other unique settings and content. Hence, the SharePoint site collection is a hierarchical set of sites that can be managed together. Sites within a site collection have common features, such as shared permissions, galleries for templates, content types, and Web Parts, and they often share common navigation. A subsite can inherit permissions and navigation structure from its parent site or these can be specified and managed independently. The creation of subsites can be delegated to users of a site collection, but a service administrator must perform the creation of site collections.

12. What is Audience targeting?
Answer: The content inside lists, libraries, web parts, etc., can be targeted to appear only for the users who are members of a particular group or audience. The audience can be identified via SharePoint groups, distribution lists, and security groups.

13. What are Managed Accounts?
Answer: To reduce the load of managing various service accounts in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, the concept of managed accounts has been introduced. Much like managed accounts in Windows Server 2008, they allow SharePoint Server to take control of all the service accounts you use. After SharePoint Server has control of these accounts, it can either manage their passwords — automatically changing them as necessary — or it can notify you when an accounts password is about to expire,
allowing you to make the change yourself.

14. What is Enterprise Metadata Management?
Answer: Enterprise metadata management (EMM) is a set of features introduced in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 that enable taxonomists, librarians, and administrators to create and manage terms and sets of terms across the enterprise.

The managed metadata service: is a service application that enables the use of managed metadata and allows you to share content types across site collections and Web applications. The service publishes a term store and content types, and the metadata is consumed via the managed metadata connection. A managed metadata service and connection are created when the metadata service application is created.

15. How Is Bcs Different From Bdc In Sharepoint?
Answer: Even though the BDC made it relatively easy to create read-only solutions that display data in the Business Data List Web Part, it was not so simple to create a solution that enabled users to make changes and write that data back to the external store.BCS, on the other hand, provides you with Read-Write capable connectivity from Client and Server to Database, WCF/Web Services, and .Net Sources. A Developer can now use SharePoint Designer 2010 and VS 2010 rapid development tools to access
external data.

16. What is Business Connectivity Services in SharePoint?
Answer: SharePoint 2010 provides a new set of technologies known as Business Connectivity Services for retrieving, editing, updating, and deleting data from external systems(e.g. data from ERP or CRM database). BCS enhances the SharePoint platform’s capabilities with out-of-box features, services, and tools that streamline the development of solutions with deep integration of external data and services.

17. Describe The Potential Components For Both A Single Server, And Multiple Servers, Potentially Several Tiered Farms?
Answer: A single-server SharePoint Server 2010 environment leverages a built-in SQL Server 2008 Express database. The problems with this environment are scalability, not being able to install them with the built-in database on a domain controller, the database cannot be larger than 4 GB, and you cannot use User Profile Synchronization in a single server with built-in database installation.

An example of a multiple tier farm would be a three-tier topology, considered one of the more efficient physical and logical layouts to supports scaling out or scaling up and provides better distribution of services across the member servers of the farm. This is considered a good architecture since one can add Web servers to the Web tier, add app servers to the application tier, and add database servers to the database tier.

18. What Are Sharepoint Sandboxed Solutions?
Answer: SharePoint 2010 provides a new sandboxed environment that enables you to run user solutions without affecting the rest of the SharePoint farm. This environment means that users can upload their custom solutions without requiring intervention from administrators, and without putting the rest of the farm at risk. This means that the existing site pages or components will not be affected by the newly added solution.

Users can deploy the below four things as sandboxed solutions:

  • WebParts.
  • Event Receivers.
  • List Definitions.
  • Workflows.

19. What is CAML, and why would you use it?
Answer: CAML stands for Collaborative Application Markup Language. CAML is an XML based language that provides data constructs that build up the SharePoint fields, view, and is used for table definition during site provisioning. CAML is responsible for rending data and the resulting HTML that is output to the user in SharePoint. CAML can be used for a variety of circumstances, overall is used to query, build and customize SharePoint based sites. A general use would be building a CAML query in a SharePoint WebPart to retrieve values from a SharePoint list.

20. Why are event receivers used in Sharepoint?
Answer: Event receivers are the classes that inherit the properties of the SpItemEventReciever and SPListEventReciever base class. Both of these classes use the abstract base class that is SPEventRecieverBase. This base class provides the option to respond to the event of the occurring of the SharePoint. It keeps the function of adding and deleting an item. The event receivers respond to the requests that come when an event is performed by the user. For example, if there a cancel of action is performed then the request is received by the event receiver and the actions will be taken according to the request received. The event receivers are used to store the input of the action that is been taken by the user by acting on the button or any other action on the site.

21. What is the relationship between Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server and Microsoft Windows Services?
Answer: Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies (including SharePoint Portal Server and Windows SharePoint Services) deliver highly scalable collaboration solutions with flexible deployment and management tools. Windows SharePoint Services provides sites for team collaboration, while Share Point Portal Server connects these sites, people, and business processes-facilitating knowledge sharing and smart organizations. SharePoint Portal Server also extends the capabilities of Windows SharePoint Services by providing organizational and management tools for SharePoint sites, and by enabling teams to publish information to the entire organization.

22. What Are My Sites?
Answer: Specialized SharePoint sites personalized and targeted for each user.

23. How To Export A Site Or List In Sharepoint 2010?
Answer: SharePoint Server 2010 provides several new features that provide a granular level of backup for various components of site content. This includes content at the site, subsite, and list level.

Through Central Administration(Granular level Back-up) a SharePoint Administrator can configure a backup of a subsite or list. An Administrator can choose a site and a specific list to be exported. The administrators can also choose to export security and select the different versions that will be exported with the list.

24. Can We Create A Single Set Of Services That Will Be Shared Across The Farm?
Answer: Similar to the SSP model in Office SharePoint Server 2007, a single set of services can be shared by all sites in a farm. By publishing a service application (from the sharing group, under the Service application tab), you can share it across server farms. This capability does not apply to all service applications, and some services can be shared only within a single server farm.

25. How Is Security Managed In Sharepoint?
Answer: Share point uses digital dashboard technology that provides an interface to create web parts and make them appear on dashboards. The security is applicable throughout the organization.

26. What Is Windows Sharepoint Services?
Answer: Creation of websites for information sharing and document collaboration will be enabled by Windows SharePoint Services. It provides additional functionality for the MS Office system and other desktop applications. It also supports a platform for the development of applications.

27. What Is Linq? How Is It Used In Sharepoint?
Answer: LINQ is a feature of the programming languages C# 3.0 and Visual Basic .NET. LINQ allows you to query in an object-oriented way, supports compile-time check, gives you IntelliSense support in Visual Studio and defines a unified, SQL like syntax to query any data source. But unlike other languages and query syntaxes which vary from one type of data source to another, LINQ can be used to query, in principle, any data source whatsoever. Hence, developers may find that it is the only query syntax that they ever need to know. It is commonly used to query objects collections, XML and SQL server data sources.

LINQ to SharePoint is officially being supported with the 2010 release. It works similar to LINQ to SQL or LINQ to Entity.

The LINQ to SharePoint Provider is defined in Microsoft.SharePoint.Linq namespace. It translates LINQ queries into Collaborative Application Markup Language (CAML) queries. The gateway class for the LINQ to SharePoint provider is Microsoft.SharePoint.Linq.DataContext which represents the data of a SharePoint Foundation Web site.

28. What’s New With Sharepoint Webparts?
Answer: A developer can create two types of web parts using Visual Studio 2010.

1. Visual Web parts: Allows you to Drag and Drop the controls from the Toolbox to WebPart Design surface. You can, of course, write your custom code in the code file. You can also package and deploy your web parts directly to Sharepoint from VS by pressing Clt+F5. Visual studio 2010 also provides you with three different views for developing web parts. The views are a split view, design view and Source view(as we have in designer 2007).

Note: The Visual Webpart project Item loads a User Control as a WebPart.

2. ASP.Net WebParts: Where a developer can build up User Interface and logic in a class file. You do not have a designer for drag and drop of controls. This web part inherits from the standard ASP.Net web part. For Deployment, we can again use ctrl+f5 to deploy this web part.

What are the Visual Studio 2010 Tools for SharePoint?

Ans. Visual Studio 2010 includes SharePoint-specific project types and project item types and includes powerful packaging, deployment, and debugging features that help increase your efficiency as a SharePoint 2010 developer.

Some of the Templates available are:

  • Visual Web Part project template.
  • List the definition template.
  • Content-Type template.
  • Empty Project template.
  • Event Receiver template.
  • some workflow templates.
  • the Site Definition template

29. How do I invite users to join a Windows SharePoint Services Site? Is the site secure?
Answer: SharePoint-based Web sites can be password-protected to restrict access to registered users, who are invited to join via e-mail. Besides, the site administrator can restrict certain members’ roles by assigning different permission levels to view post and edit. 

30. What are the different components that are used for single as well as multiple servers?
Answer: Sharepoint consists of many different components of the server that can perform many tasks at a time. The list that is given below consists of the components that are used by the SharePoint and it is as follow:

1. Sharepoint foundation: This is the program that provides the communication, collaboration, and management of the content between the server systems.

2. Sharepoint server: This consists of the software that provides the material for both the internet as well as local sites.

3. SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) Integration: It is a feature that allows the installation and the containment of the reports to be managed in the SharePoint itself.

4. Business Connectivity Services (BCS): It is a feature that allows the system to display the data that is contained inside the SharePoint server. The data can be directly manipulated and worked upon from the SharePoint.

5. Sites: It is a SharePoint site that is managed by checking the compatibility with the content-management features.

6. The single server consists of the database servers and the servers that consist of all the data related information. The single server environment is not scalable and many applications can’t be installed because of the reduced size. Multiple servers are used to keep user Profile Synchronization in a single server with all the built-in functionalities like a database. Another server will consist of the services that are distributed to many layers and provide easy scaling up of the architecture.

31. How can SharePoint be used in enterprises fro document and content management?
Answer:
All the electronic documents and records can easily be tracked, monitored, controlled, searched, archived, as well as stored easily with the help of this tool. It has been provided with most dynamic features with the help of which the users are free to go for information management, legal needs as well as process requirement fulfillment. It has also been provided with dedicated features for graphs and functionality. It has a collaborative approach and can easily be integrated with real-time applications and software such as Microsoft Office. 

32. What is delegate control in SharePoint?
Answer:
 It is a function that enables the Object-oriented features to be controlled. When the need felt, they can even be replaced through custom control. It is not necessary always that they need to be modified for this task.

33. Why security matters in the documents management and storage?
Answer:
Security is probably one of the major and prime concerns. The users have to make sure of it always. Without security, there are strong chances of information leak. This can affect the sales as plans can be adopted by other competitive businesses upon information leaks. Security always makes sure that documents remain safe and the information cannot be accessed by anyone who is not authorized to do so. Also, the security of documents simply enables users to access them anytime from any remote location.

34. What Is Microsoft Sharepoint Portal Server?
Answer: SharePoint Portal Server is a portal server that connects people, teams, and knowledge across business processes. SharePoint Portal Server integrates information from various systems into one secure solution through single sign-on and enterprise application integration capabilities. It provides flexible deployment and management tools, and facilitates end-to-end collaboration through data aggregation, organization, and searching. SharePoint Portal Server also enables users to quickly find relevant information through customization and personalization of portal content and layout as well as through audience targeting.

35. What are picture libraries?
Answer: WebPartManager sealed class consists of the responsibility for the management that is occurring on the webpage. This consists of controls, events and other activities that need to be saved and worked upon. It is responsible to provide a central class through which the data can be controlled using the control set. It consists of all the methods that are required by the control developers for the extension of WebPartManager that controlled inside the WebPartManagerInternals class. It includes simplifies API and libraries that inherit the customized properties of the control. It includes the controls with custom display modes, zones, verbs, WebPart controls, and extensions that are used for the web user interface.

36. What are the important features of SharePoint?
Answer: Whenever a new version of SharePoint is launched new features are added to it. These features act as a proper base for Content Management, Business Process Management, and Web Publishing. The tools are as below:

  • SharePoint Sites is useful for creating websites.
  • Insights act as a tool which brings all information together from different data sources.
  • SharePoint Communicates helps in networking and collaborating with different people.
  • Search helps in providing efficient and quick information and the contents of an enterprise.
  • Contents act as a perfect Content Management System.
  • Lastly, Composition assists in using different tools and capabilities together.

37. How do you return SharePoint List items using SharePoint web services?
Answer: To retrieve list items from a SharePoint list through Web Services, you should use the lists.ASMX web service by establishing a web reference in Visual Studio. The lists.asmx exposes the GetListItems method, which will allow the return of the full content of the list in an XML node. It will take parameters like the GUID of the name of the list you are querying against, the GUID of the view you are going to query, etc. Side Question: I got asked how I built queries with the lists.ASMX web service. To build queries with this service, one of the parameters that the GetListItems method exposes is the option to build a CAML query. There are other ways to do this as well, but that was how I answered it.
When retrieving List items using SharePoint Web Services, how do you specify explicitly?

38. Workflow can be applied to what all elements of SharePoint?
Answer: Workflow associations are often created directly on lists and libraries, a workflow association can also be created on a content type that exists within the Content-Type Gallery for the current site or content types defined within a list. In short, it can be applied …At the level of a list/library At the level of a content type defined at site scope At the level of a content type defined at list scope.

39. What are Features of SharePoint?
Answer: Communities: The new version of SharePoint allows users to work together in different ways. Microsoft has enhanced the social feature of SharePoint 2007 in SharePoint 2010 and has made it look better. Communities allow people to collaborate in groups, share knowledge, and find information on various topics easily.

Content: SharePoint content shifts SharePoint 2010 from a departmental solution to an enterprise solution. There has been a massive improvement in content wherein users can add a significant number of documents to SharePoint. They can even use external data storage options to store more data.

Search: Microsoft SharePoint 2010 has acquired the FAST search server, which improves the search tremendously for users. Now, users not only can search for content but also people. Users can opt for better language options with thumbnails and previews. Users can even sort out the search queries and study similar searches to get relevant search results.

Insights: with the help of SharePoint insights, users can access information through different data sources like dashboards, scorecards, reports and more. To help users, Microsoft has introduced a performance point server to the SharePoint platform. It is also known as Performance point services for SharePoint. It helps users discover the right people and expertise to make better business decisions.

Compositions: SharePoint being a complete platform helps users in creating their code solution on-premises or in the cloud. The complex application can be developed with the help of well-known tools like:

InfoPath

SharePoint designer 2010

Visio 2010.

40. What is Document Library?
Answer: A Document library allows users to easily store, upload, share, collaborate, and track documents or files. Users can also store the properties related to documents called metadata to make the documents easily searchable.

41. What are the views?
Answer: Users can use views to see the items in a list or library that are most important to the user or that best fit a purpose. For example, users can create views of the files that were created most recently, of the list items that apply to a specific department, or of the files created by one person. After creating a view, it is always available when the user looks at a list or library. Users can create personal views and public views. A personal view is available only to the user while looking at a list or library. A public view is available when anyone looks at a list or library. To create a public view, the user must have permission to change the design of the list or library. Users can make a public view of the default view for a list or library.

42. how is an event listener useful?
Answer: Enables SharePoint users and custom code to receive notifications of events that occur in an external system.

43. What is the primary benefit of using apps for SharePoint?
Answer: Each app for SharePoint is isolated from the rest of the system.

44. How are BDC models and apps for SharePoint related?
Answer: BDC models can be scoped to apps for SharePoint and connection information is defined and stored separately from the app-scoped BDC model in BDC connections. 

45. What is the In-Memory BI Engine (IMBI)?
Answer: The In-Memory multidimensional data analysis engine (IMBI), also known as the Vertipaq engine, allows for almost instant analysis.

46. What is the Analysis Services Effective User?
Answer: Eliminates the need for Kerberos delegation when per-user authentication is used for Analysis Services data sources. By supporting the Analysis Services Effective User feature, authorization checks will be based on the user-specified by the EffectiveUserName property instead of using the currently authenticated user.

47. What does the Workflow Manager do?
Answer:
 High Density and Multi-Tenancy, Elastic Scale, Activity / Workflow Artifact Management, Tracking and Monitoring, Instance Management, Fully Declarative Authoring, REST and Service Bus Messaging, Managed Service Reliability.

48. How would you create an Information Site in SharePoint 2010?
Answer:
 In SharePoint 2010 You can create a Read-Only Farm/site or site-collection by setting the Content database as Read-only. In SharePoint 2010 You can create a Read-Only Farm/site or site-collection by setting the Content database as Read-only. In a read-only farm, only content databases are read-only. All other databases, including the configuration database, Central Administration content database, and search database, are read/write.The site collection that is associated with a read-only content database is automatically set to be read-only.

The user experience of a read-only site is characterized by the following:

  •  Common tasks that do not require writing to the content database are fully available.
  •  Most of the common tasks that require writing to the content database are not available, either because they have been
  • disabled in the user interface or because the user is no longer allowed to apply changes.
  • Some common tasks that require writing to the content database appear to be available but return errors.

49. What is Content-Type?
Answer:
A content type is a reusable collection of metadata (columns), workflow, behavior, and other settings for a category of items or documents. Content types enable the user to manage the settings for a category of information in a centralized and reusable manner. A content type defines the attributes of a list item, a document, or a folder. Each content type can specify properties to associate with items of its type.

50. Do you have experience with video hosting, FTP, and similar applications?
Answer: Administrators are often required to provide third-party web-based sessions and services, with communication between both clients and the company, which require technological competence, communication, and ability to coordinate other people’s activities.

Note: Browse latest Sharepoint interview questions and Sharepoint tutorial. Here you can check sharepoint Training details and sharepoint training videos for self learning. Contact +91 988 502 2027 for more information.

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