SharePoint 2013: Interview Questions

Introduction

Below are some interview questions that come to mind vis a vis hiring for a SharePoint administrator or developer. This is a work in progress.  These interview questions primarily focus on hiring for SharePoint farm administrators and developers

Questions

1. General Farm Administrator (non-technical)
1. These non-technical farm administrator questions can be accessed by any interviewer and do not require that the interviewer has a technical background.  They can be asked over the phone. The information gathered from these questions can help in making the first cut among applications.
2. What is your current role with SharePoint and with what versions and editions?
1. Description: 
1. In asking this question, the key thing is to determine the level of involvement, and this can be found by discovering the role that the candidate had or currently has.  
2. Versions might be 2007, 2010, 2013 and 2016.  2010-2016 editions might be SharePoint Foundation or SharePoint Server. 2007 editions would be Office SharePoint Server and Windows SharePoint Services.
3. Use the responses to quickly gauge the adequacy of the candidate's experience: if you are hiring for a farm administrator role, you need someone who has at least assistant farm admin experience in administering a farm - site collection administrator or subsite or content administrator experience is inadequate as there are significant differences in experience and qualifications between a site collection administrator and a farm administrator.  Farm administrators must deal with server-level issues and server-level troubleshooting; site collection administrators and below do not. 
4. If you're looking for someone to fill a farm admin role, look for someone having farm-level experience.  A candidate who has both server administration and SharePoint administration experience is ideal.
2. Example Responses:
1. Farm Administrator, SharePoint Server 2013 Enterprise
2. Lead farm administrator
3. Assistant farm admin
4. Site Collection administrator, SharePoint Server 2010
5. Site administrator
3. How many farms do you manage, what are their types and the number of users?
1. Description: 
1. responses to this question provide insight into the candidate's depth of experience and adequacy for the admin role you are trying to fill.
2. The more closely the candidate's level of experience here aligns with the needs you are trying to fill the better.
3. The more farms simultaneously managed, the greater likelihood that the candidate is able to multi-task and is familiar with SharePoint and general IT architecture matters, such as partitioning production from development and why this is useful.
2. Example Responses:
1. Three farms: production, development and staging, 2000 users
2. Two farms: production and development, 400 users
3. One farm: production and has 200 users.
4. Three farms: production, development and a disaster-recovery/staging farm.
4. How many servers are there in the farms you currently administer and what are their types and roles?
1. Description
1. Responses to this question provide insight into the candidate's depth of experience and adequacy for the role you are trying to fill.
2. Responses also help provide insight into the candidate's familiarity with SharePoint farm servers and their roles.  
3. An experienced SharePoint administrator will show factual knowledge of all server roles and will discuss these roles in describing current farm admin experience.  The experienced candidate will likely refer to SharePoint farm servers by their roles - "App" or "batch" server for application server and "WFE" or "front end" for web front end; and so on.
4. The experienced and knowledgeable candidate will also demonstrate the ability to explain the differences between these basic SharePoint farm roles - database server, application server and web front end server - and the primary purpose of their roles in delivering SharePoint capabilities to users.
2. Example Responses
1. The production farm has 8 servers: two SQL database servers in cluster or AlwaysOn configuration, two application servers, three web front ends and a single OWA server.
2. The staging farm is a mirror of the production farm.
3. The development farm is a single Windows Server that has SQL Server and SharePoint Server co-hosted.
4. The disaster recovery farm is a full mirror of the production farm, having the same number and types of servers and configuration.
5. What previous roles have you had involving SharePoint?
1. Description: 
1. The goal here is to determine historical experience with SharePoint.  The longer the history, the longer the demonstrated commitment to and likely depth of experience in SharePoint administration and development.
2. Example Response:
1. 2010: designer
2. 2010-2011: website management
3. 2011-2013: asst farm admin
4. 2013-2016: lead farm admin
6. What IT and SharePoint-related certifications do you have?
1. Description
1. Certifications do not show ability but basic knowledge and commitment.  
2. A candidate that has many IT certifications is someone in my view who has demonstrated commitment to information technology as a career.  
3. A candidate that has certifications in a particular field relating to the field you are hiring for obviously has demonstrated commitment to that field.
4. SharePoint is a complex system of systems software application that relies deeply on the capabilities of other system software, including; Windows Server, SQL Server, Internet Information Services Server, and so on.  Therefore, a candidate who has certifications in related fields in addition to SharePoint demonstrates deeper involvement in SharePoint and appreciates the importance of knowledge in related fields.
5. The more demonstrated knowledge and ability that a candidate has in these related software the better that candidate will be at troubleshooting server issues in general and SharePoint in particular because administration and troubleshooting SharePoint issues frequently involves interacting with these other software. Therefore, a candidate that has certifications in other areas, particularly Windows Server and SQL Server, is a candidate that will likely be able to administer and solve SharePoint issues more effectively.
6. The more significant the position being hired for (eg, SharePoint farm administrator), the more the expectation that the candidate has some certifications.
7. Certifications are not in my view a sole determining qualification, but provide a useful edge factor, where all other qualifications are equal, in determining candidate adequacy.
2. Example Responses
1. MCIT, MCTS SharePoint 2010, 2013
2. MCPs and MTAs in Windows Server, Networking and SQL Server
3. MCSE Windows Server
4. 
   
2. General Developer (non-technical)
1. These non-technical developer questions can be accessed by any interviewer and do not require that the interviewer has a technical background.  They can be asked over the phone. The information gathered from these questions can help in making the first cut among applications.
2. What is your current role as a SharePoint Developer?
3. 
   
3. Technical - Developer
1. These questions serve to probe the candidate's knowledge, skill and experience in SharePoint development.  These questions would useful for engaging candidates who have passed the first cut and have been asked to a face-to-face interview.  These questions do not focus on esoteric aspects of SharePoint development but on the common, routine aspects that developers would engage when working with SharePoint.
2. General Knowledge
1. What is the general hierarchy of SharePoint architecture?
1. Answer: Farm > Web Application > database > site collections > webs > lists > columns.
2. In preparing a deployment plan for a new feature, what is the very first step that should be performed prior to actually deploying the feature to the farm?
1. Answer: backup a backup should be performed prior to making any significant changes to a farm.
3. What is a freely available tool developed by Microsoft useful for viewing ULS logs?
1. Answer: ULS VIewer 
2. Any SharePoint involved person who has experience retrieving and analyzing ULS logs will most likely also have knowledge of ULS Viewer, and so this is a discovery question.
4. What is the name of the UI used to administer a SharePoint farm?
1. Answer: Central Administration
5. What is the name of the shell that can be used to administer a SharePoint farm via PowerShell commandlets?
1. Answer: SharePoint Management Shell.
3. General Developer Knowledge Questions
1. What is an event receiver?
1. Answer: Event Receivers are functions that get triggered when a specific event occurs in SharePoint.
2. Followup question: how are event receivers useful?
1. Answer: Using event receivers, automated actions can be implemented that respond to changes in SharePoint lists and list items.
3. What is a "WSP"?
1. Answer: Windows Solution Package.  It is the solution set of files generated by Visual Studio that implements changes to SharePoint.
4. What is a "solution Manifest"?
1. Answer: A solution manifest file defines the constituent parts of a solution, including its files, assemblies, code access security, Web Parts, Features, site definitions, and other resources
5. What are two ways in which you can install a sandbox WSP?
1. Answer: 1) upload to site collection solution gallery, and 2) via PowerShell.
6. What are some differences between a farm solution and a sandbox solution?
1. Answers: 
1. Farm Solutions
1.  Hosted in the IIS worker process
2. Run code that can affect the entire farm
3. Trust level is at the farm level
4. May require App pool and IIS restart/recycle
5. Only a farm administrator can install a farm solution
2. Sandbox Solutions
1.  Hosted in the user code solution process
2. Only affects the site collection
3. Trust level is limited to the site collection
4. Does not require IIS recycle
5. A site collection administrator or above can install a sandbox solution
7. What are the two main types of navigation that are available OOTB for a SharePoint page and where are they located on the page?
1. Answer:
1. Global, also known as the Top Link Bar, located near the top of the page
2. Local, also known as Quick Launch, located along the left column of the page.
8. What is a "feature" in SharePoint?
1. Answer: Features are packages of functionality that you can activate and deactivate in SharePoint farm.
2. Answer: Features make it easier to activate or deactivate functionality in the course of a deployment, and administrators can easily transform the template or definition of a site by turning on or turning off a particular Feature in the user interface.
9. Followup: name some scopes that a feature can have:
1. Answer: 
1. Farm
2. Web Application
3. Site
4. Web
10. Followup: how do you deploy a feature to a SharePoint Farm?
1. Answer: it is first developed in Visual Studio and then packaged as a WSP file, which is then uploaded and installed to the farm.
11. 
    
4. General Developer Troubleshooting Questions
1. You are developing a workflow using SharePoint Designer. The workflow has multiple steps.  The workflow fails at some place in the workflow.  You want to find out at what step in the workflow is failing.  What is one simple way in which you can do this that only requires minor modification of the workflow?
1. Answer: add Log actions before and after each step or action.
2. You are attempting to activate the SharePoint Server Publishing feature for a web.  How do you activate the feature without using PowerShell?
1. Answer: Site Collection > Web > Settings > Site Settings > Site Actions > Manage site features
3. On clicking Activate for the SharePoint Server Publishing feature, the next page you see is the "Sorry, something went wrong" message displayed.  How would you begin troubleshooting this problem?
1. Answer: use the correlation ID presented in the "Sorry, something went wrong" message to search in the ULS logs for the group of messages associated with the activation failure.
4. Follow up: you try to use PowerShell to retrieve all messages associated with the correlation ID, but nothing is returned.  What could be the problem?
1. Answer: PowerShell retrieves those messages that have been copied to the Diagnostics database, but this only occurs on a periodic basis.  If PowerShell retrieves nothing, it's likely that they haven't yet been harvested and copied to the Diagnostics database where they are retrievable by using PowerShell.
5. You are using SharePoint Designer to develop workflows.  One day, you fire up Designer and find that the Workflow 2013 option no longer appears when trying to add 2013 workflows to a list.  What is one possible reason for this?
1. Answer: Workflow 2013 has been disabled or inactivated in or removed from the farm.
6. Followup: you discover that Workflow 2013 is installed and operating.  What is a simple troubleshooting step you can perform locally to possibly resolve the problem?
1. Answer: clear the Designer cache.
5. General Developer Experience Questions
1. Describe a project that you developed for SharePoint that involved CSOM.
2. How would you develop a client-side site collection scope solution such that it can be migrated to a new farm via simple database attach method?
1. Answer: ensure that all resources are stored locally in the site collection (e.g., JavaScript files, CSS files stored in resources folder).
3. Please describe a client-side solution that you developed.
4. Please describe a server-side solution that you developed.
5. Please describe an app model solution that you developed.
4. Technical - Administrator
1. These questions serve to probe the candidate's knowledge, skill and experience in SharePoint administration.  These questions would useful for engaging candidates who have passed the first cut and have been asked to a face-to-face interview.  These questions do not focus on esoteric aspects of SharePoint administration but on the common, routine, practical aspects of SharePoint that administrators would engage when working with SharePoint on a daily basis
2. General Knowledge
1. What is the general hierarchy of SharePoint architecture?
1. Answer: Farm > Web Application > database > site collections > webs > lists > columns.
2. In preparing a deployment plan for a new feature, what is the very first step that should be performed prior to actually deploying the feature to the farm?
1. Answer: a backup should be performed prior to making any significant changes to a farm.
3. What is a freely available tool developed by Microsoft useful for viewing ULS logs?
1. Answer: ULS VIewer 
2. Any SharePoint involved person who has experience retrieving and analyzing ULS logs will most likely also have knowledge of ULS Viewer, and so this is a discovery question.
4. What is the name of the UI used to administer a SharePoint farm?
1. Answer: Central Administration
5. What is the name of the shell that can be used to administer a SharePoint farm via PowerShell commandlets?
1. Answer: SharePoint Management Shell.
3. General Administrator Knowledge Questions
1. A user needs to store files in his department's SharePoint site.  What app would you create for the user to store the files?
1. Answer: Document Library
2. What are four common permission levels that can be assigned to user accounts or SharePoint user groups?
1. Valid Answers: Full Control, Design, Edit, Contribute and Read
3. What are the names of four common OOTB SharePoint user groups?
1. Answers: Owners, Designers, Members, Contributors, Visitors
4. When you add a document library to a website, what are the default permissions of the document library?
1. Answer: same as the website
5. Followup: what do you have to do in order to make the document library's permissions different from its parent website?
1. Answer: break inheritance
6. How do you navigate to the Site Settings page of a site collection?
1. Answer: click Settings ("Gear" icon) > Site Settings.
7. How do you break the permissions inheritance for a subwebsite from its parent site?
1. Answer: navigate to: Settings > Site Settings > Users and Permissions > Site permissions > PERMISSIONS Ribbon tab > Stop Inheriting Permissions
8. What are three ways in which users can upload files to a document library?
1. Answer: Upload Document button, Drag-and-drop onto library, open Windows Explorer view onto library
9. Explain one or two ways in which users can upload their spreadsheets to their SharePoint website.
1. Answers:
1. Copy & paste spreadsheet columns and rows onto  the list, use the
2. Import Spreadsheet app and use the
3. Export Table to SharePoint list capability in Excel.
10. How do you add a new subwebsite to an existing website in SharePoint?
1. Answer: Navigate to: Site Settings ("Gear" icon) > Site Content > click on new subsite.
4. Advanced Administrator Knowledge Questions
1. 
   
5. Bonus Questions
1. What little-known tool can be useful in troubleshooting User Profile Synchronization issues?
1. Description: there is a little
2. Hints: "Forefront identity"
3. Response: Forefront Identity Manager 2010.