Skip to content

SharePoint Search Operational Role (Job Responsibilities)

I was recently asked about what sort of things should be in a job description for a person who manages search in a SharePoint environment. I say all of the time that search isn’t a product — it’s a process. What I mean by that is the product will only get you so far. A human will have to be involved to make the tool really valuable. Here’s what I sent to the client as a final set of activities/skills/responsibilities:

Help Your SharePoint User
  • Review and Resolve Crawl Logs for Errors and Warning
  • Review Crawl Logs for Performance and Heartbeat
  • Periodically review performance data for the search indexer to identify impending performance issues
  • Manage the indexing process
    • Review requests for new content sources
    • Develop, monitor, and tune content crawling schedules
    • Implement appropriate crawler impact rules
    • Implement and maintain crawl rules to control what content is in the index
    • Work with network operations to control permissions for the crawler account to manage what is in the index
    • Manage search scopes
  • Review usage reports and work with the organization to improve relevancy by leveraging out of the box tuning parameters including:
    • Changes to the noise words files
    • Changes to the thesaurus file
    • Changes to the authoritative sites list
    • Changes to keywords and best bets

Thanks to Spencer Harbar and Ben Curry for their contributions to this.

No comment yet, add your voice below!


Add a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Share this: