In my recent Governance talks I've been pushing a concept similar to the idea of Baby steps or crawling before you run.  Essentially the idea is you need to start with an out of the box SharePoint deployment that isn't changing before you roll it out.  The way to accomplish this is with pilot deployments and with staged deployments so you can get comfortable with moving parts.  Using MOF and implementing change control boards to review change is another way to "get use to" things as they roll out.  Product support has run into environments that are so unlike SharePoint they are asked to backup and restore what's left of their databases into a clean environment, and have even heard that that wasn't enough.  They were asked to simply move the content through web folders or map drives and copy content across to a new environment.  Sad.

 

 

Newbie: As a newbie to SharePoint you need to get use to the lists, libraries, settings and features out of the box.

 

Teen: After you learn the basics of out of the box features, you can move into basic extensibility and integration with AD with stuff like My sites and profiles.  Indexing content outside of SharePoint and using basic workflows and content approval.  You know that teens think they know everything.  Be cautious about this.

 

Tween: Love the term, but essentially as you move up the ranks and get comfortable with what you can do excersizing the enterprise features of the product is definitely now within reach.  Building KPIs, Excel Dashboards, pushing the reports and integration with other Microsoft products is definitely within reach.  Now is the time to learn the limits to variations and more WCM.  Starting earlier will cause some heartburn.  Buying third party products to build solutions on SharePoint is a good idea to extend the platform while achieving scale and supportability.

 

Rockstar: Line of Business integration and full solutions deployment on SharePoint is where your comfort level is.  To show your a rockstar it's proof in the pudding that you won't ever approach this without a separate dev environment at a minimum.  Virtualization of multiple environments for pushing out service packs and change management boards are common practice.  ITIL and MOF considerations are how you analyze risk and service management.  The true IT SharePoint Rockstar owns their environment and believes it is their baby.  They also realize that SharePoint is becoming the heart and soul for achieving what the business needs are and what they will be.