SharePoint Basic Interview Questions and Answers for Freshers and Experienced Developers

SharePoint Basic Interview Questions and Answers for Freshers and Experienced Developers

Below is the list of SharePoint basic interview questions and answers. These SharePoint interview questions and answers are meant for freshers as well as for experienced developers. So, If you going for an interview on SharePoint, I suggest you to must give a look at following SharePoint interview questions. These SharePoint interview questions are based on basic introduction to SharePoint, why we need SharePoint, MOSS, WSP, Zones in SharePoint, BDC, Field Controls, Application Pages in SharePoint, CAML etc. So lets have a look on following basic SharePoint interview questions and answers.

Q 1.What is SharePoint? 

Microsoft SharePoint is an enterprise collaboration and content management platform which enables users to connect each other and share the information across an organization. Indirectly this solves the problems in an organization to share the documents, security, business process, maintaining data etc. SharePoint 2010 has rich UI and plenty of features.

Q 2. What are the types of input forms that can be created for a workflow?

You can create four different types of input forms including

1. An association form

2. An initiation form

3. A modification form

4. A task edit form.

Q 3. What is MOSS?

Answer :  Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) is the full version of a portal-based platform for collaboratively creating, managing and sharing documents and Web services. In MOSS additional feature add that can not in WSS 3.0.

Q 4. What is a site collection in SharePoint?

1. A site collection is a set of web sites.

2. Every site collection has top-level site, created when the site collection is created.

3. There might be multiple site collections in web application and each site collection may have a multiple child sites.

Q 5. What is WSP (Web solution package)?

When developer does any customization or enhancement in SharePoint, then there are many items that need to be deployed like assemblies, resource files, features, images, application pages, site definitions etc. It will be a very tedious task to deploy these items separately on development, staging and production. So SharePoint introduced a solution package which is powerful deployment tool. Web solution package is a cabinet file that contains assemblies, resource files, features, images, application pages, site definitions etc. into single file.

Note: A solution package is stored as a cabinet (CAB) file, with the file extension .wsp. This file contains all the files to be deployed. If you rename the file extension to .cab, you can open the solution and explore its content .It can be deployed using the command-line tool stsadm or PowerShell cmdlets.

Q 6. How will you set up a Platform for Testing SharePoint WebParts?

We would need to install :

1. WSS 3.0

2. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 installed.

3. Windows Server 2003 or 2008.

4. Visual Studio 2005 or 2008.

Q 7. What are the various zones in SharePoint?

- Zones provide the separate logical paths of authentication for the same web application.

- 5 zones can be created for each web application :

a. Default

b. Intranet

c. Extranet

d. Internet and

e. Custom

Q 8. Whats is SharePoint site collection?

A collection of SharePoint sites that share common administration pages and site settings. Site collections allow you to share content types, site columns, templates, and Web Parts within a group of SharePoint sites.

Q 9.What is Business Data Catalog or BDC?

It is a shared service that enables Office SharePoint Server 2007 to display business data from various back-end servers into a SharePoint page. Business Data Catalog or BDC provides built-in support for displaying data with various webparts and list\list columns that can help in easy creation of dashboards with data from your SQL, web services, SAP, Siebel, or any other line-of-business (LOB) applications.

Q 10. What is a Field Control?

Field controls are simple ASP.NET 2.0 server controls that provide the basic field functionality of SharePoint. They provide basic general functionality such as displaying or editing list data as it appears on SharePoint list pages.

Q 11. What are the Methods of Backup and Recovery in SharePoint 2010?

Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 provides a broad range of levels for performing backups, including the entire farm, farm configuration information, site collections, subsites, or lists.

SharePoint Server 2010 uses two different tools to configure backup and recovery.

1. Central Administration : Central Administration provides a user interface where SharePoint Administrators will be prompted via menu structures to select the information that needs to be backed up. (see the Image below)

2. Windows PowerShell : Windows PowerShell is a command line tool that provides SharePoint administrators a way to perform backup and recovery with additional options such as file compression or working with SQL snapshots.

Q 12. What are Application Pages in SharePoint?

Unlike site pages (for example, default.aspx), a custom application page is deployed once per Web server and cannot be customized on a site-by-site basis. Application pages are based in the virtual _layouts directory. In addition, they are compiled into a single assembly DLL.

A good example of an Application Page is the default Site Settings page: every site has one, and it’s not customizable on a per site basis (although the contents can be different for sites).

With application pages, you can also add inline code. With site pages, you cannot add inline code.

Q 13. What is CAML?

CAML stands for Collaborative Application Markup Language and is an XML-based languagethat is used in Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services to define sites and lists, including, for Eg, fields, views, or forms, but CAML is also used to define tables in the Windows SharePoint Servies database during site provisioning. Developers mostly use CAML Queries to retrieve data from Lists\libraries.

Q 14. Whats New with SPAlerts in SharePoint 2010?

In SharePoint 2007, alerts were send only through e-mails, but in SharePoint 2010 users can also send an alert to mobile devices as SMS Message. A New property DeliveryChannels is introduced to indicate, whether the alert is delivered as E-mail or as an SMS Message.

Q 15. What is the difference between a Site Definition and a Site Template?

Site Definitions are stored on the hard drive of the SharePoint front end servers. They are used by the SharePoint application to generate the sites users can create. Site Templates are created by users as a copy of a site they have configured and modified so that they do not have to recreate lists, libraries, views and columns every time they need a new instance of a site.

Q 16. How to Export a Site or List in SharePoint 2010?

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.

Q 17. What is LINQ. How is it used in SharePoint?

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. It is commonly used to query objects collections, XML and SQL server data sources.

The LINQ to SharePoint Provider is defined in the Microsoft.SharePoint.Linq namespace. It translates LINQ queries into Collaborative Application Markup Language (CAML) queries.

Q 18. What is claims based authentication?

Claims is a new authentication method that SharePoint 2010 can utilize. This allows a single authentication store for multiple types of authentication (Windows NTLM, SQL FBA, LDAP, etc) which allows all of these types of authentication to access SharePoint under a single URL.

Claims creates a SAML token based on the sign-in, that contains the user’s identity.

Q 19. How will you deploy files such as CSS, JS in SharePoint 2010?

The most preferable way to deploy files in SharePoint is by using the solution package. In SharePoint 2010 you can create an empty project with VS 2010 and then add a new SharePoint Mapped folder in it. This will give the desired location in 14 hive where you can then add a file to deploy.

Q 20. What are Parallel and Serial actions?

When you have more than one action associated with a condition, the actions can be set up to run at the same time (parallel) or one after another (serial), the default.

Q 21. When should you dispose SPWeb and SPSite objects? And even more important, when not?

You should always dispose them if you created them yourself, but not otherwise. You should never dispose SPContext.Current.Web/Site and you should normally not dispose SPWeb if IsRootWeb is true. More tricky constructs are things along the line of SPList.ParentWeb.

Q 22. What security levels are assigned to users?

Security levels are assigned by the administrator who is adding the user. There are four levels by default and additional levels can be composed as necessary.

*Reader – Has read-only access to the Web site.

*Contributor – Can add content to existing document libraries and lists.

* Web Designer – Can create lists and document libraries and customize pages in the Web site.

* Administrator – Has full control of the Web site.

Q 23. What does a SPWebApplication object represent?

The SPWebApplication objects represents a SharePoint Web Application, which essentially is an IIS virtual server. Using the class you can instigate high level operations, such as getting all the features of an entire Web Application instance, or doing high level creation operations like creating new Web Applications through code. 

Q 24. Difference between SharePoint designer workflows and custom workflows?

Only sequential workflows can be created in SharePoint Designer; state machine workflows cannot be created in SharePoint Designer.

Deployment and moving is easy in custom workflows when compared to SharePoint designer workflows.

Visual Studio can have code-behind.

Visual Studio generates a workflow template which can be easily be deployed, SharePoint Designer workflows are typically built against specific lists and sites.

Visual Studio allows for debugging!!

Q 25. What is Windows Powershell?

Windows PowerShell is Microsoft’s task automation framework, consisting of a command-line shell and associated scripting language built on top of, and integrated with the .NET Framework. PowerShell provides full access to COM and WMI, enabling administrators to perform administrative tasks on both local and remote Windows systems.