Recently I held a lecture in my local communitiy group about building composite (no-code) bussiness solutions on Sharepoint. Since this type of solutions are particullary interesting to SharePoint power users, I took some time to determine who can be a power user. It seems to me that the definiton of a power user has been pretty streched and that today everybody with full rights is regarded as a power user. I think this is wrong and potentially dangerous. For me users need to earn the right to become a power user. This means that they should go through detail training about SharePoint and work some time with experianced SharePoint users till they get enough experiance. Another aspect is that they should also have little more insight into bussiness process inside their firm/department/team. This can make them power users that are able to use SharePoint as a powerfull tool to help their organization.
What are your thoughts on this?
Ultimately it really depends upon the organization. Many organizations adopt the Power User terminology for somebody who is extremely advanced with a particular product such as Excel. Many organizations are also using the title of Site Owners and Power Users interchangeably. Again depending upon the organization I could actually see both co-existing depending upon the department and their particular needs.
I agree, cerification is a good way to check you users knowledge.
I guess.. you can also require your Power Users to pass a certification to show their skills : http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/exam.aspx?id=77-425#fbid=zFUZA6_G3Bm
A Power User is a person that is not necessary in the IT department of the company that has more skills than a normal user. Skills like managing permissions, SP Designer, creating content types, etc. I do agree they need training for those skills, and also a bit of business knowledge.
