SharePoint Interview Questions

If you're looking for SharePoint Interview Questions, you are at the right place. Mindmajix presenting a list of Top 101 interview questions on Sharepoint for Experienced & Freshers. There are a lot of opportunities from many reputed companies in the world. According to Datanyze SharePoint has a market share of about 23.34%

So, You still have the opportunity to move ahead in your career by choosing SharePoint. Okay, Let's dive right in

Top 100 SharePoint Interview Questions and Answers

We have categorized SharePoint Interview Questions - 2023 (Updated) into 2 levels they are

• For Freshers
• For Experienced

Top 10 Frequently Asked SharePoint Interview Questions

1. What is Microsoft SharePoint?
2. What is the site hierarchy model in SharePoint?
3. What does the content database handle in SharePoint?
4. How to create a document library in SharePoint?
5. What are the OneDrive sync issues?
6. What is the difference between BCS and BDC?
7. What is WSP?
8. What is FBA authentication?
9. Differentiate between SharePoint and Confluence?
10. List out some of the commands in the Powerapps module?

Best SharePoint Online Interview Questions for Freshers

1. What is Microsoft SharePoint?

Microsoft SharePoint is a browser-based collaboration and document management platform. It is used for creating websites that access workspaces, documents, as well as host defined applications such as blogs and wikis. We can use it as a secure place for storing, organizing, sharing, and accessing information from any device.

2. What is Sharepoint used for and is it free?

It is comprised of a multipurpose set of technologies used for internal purposes to assist and simplify the workflow within an organization. It is not a free platform; a user has to take a subscription for it.

3. Explain Zones and types in SharePoint?

Zones are the logical paths for accessing the same web application. For each web application, five zones can be created, and they are-

• Default
• Intranet
• Extranet
• Internet
• Custom

4. What is LINQ and how it is useful in SharePoint?

Ans: LINQ (language integrated query) uses a SQL-like syntax to frame query expression in an object language way to fetch data from the databases in SharePoint.

5. What are the benefits a company would be getting after switching to SharePoint 2013?

• Integrated search
• Improved workflow
• Improved business intelligence
• Ease of storage management
• Mobile compatibility
• Social media friendly
• Enhanced publishing, designing, and metadata management
• Copy-paste option for content authors
• Ease of customizing error pages

6. What is the difference between SharePoint Online and Office365?

SharePoint Online and Office 365 do share some capabilities-such as storing documents. Office 365 refers to subscription plans, while SharePoint Online is a collaborative platform that allows an enterprise to store, retrieve, manage, and report on digitized documents. 

SharePoint Online:

• It is a component of cloud-based Office 365, and available as a standalone product.
• It is a collection of web and cloud-based technologies.
• Custom workflow is needed for content management.
• For certain types of content, complex security provisions are required.
• Collaboration is complex.

Office 365:

• It offers limited access to multiple functionalities.
• Collaborations are uncomplicated.
• It shares the server with various tenants(other subscribers).
• Supports application model and client-side object.

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7. What is the latest version of SharePoint and explain its features?

• The latest version of SharePoint is SharePoint Server 2019.
• The new features supported by the SharePoint server 2019 are listed below:

SharePoint Home:

It brings all the news from communication sites and team sites together into one central board.

Modern team and communication sites:

The major feature of SharePoint Server 2019 is a modern team and communication site, that includes different templates: topic, blank, and showcase. 

User-friendly pages, authoring, and web parts:

Anyone can create content easily with the new user-friendly improvements in the SharePoint Server 2019.

Lists and libraries:

SharePoint Server 2019 also supports modern SharePoint lists and libraries. Modern SharePoint lists include conditional formatting features. Modern SharePoint libraries support users to quickly view their information about documents, including metadata and permissions.

Simplified sharing experience:

This modern feature is a major improvement to secure the external sharing of folders and files.

Suite Navigation and App Launcher:

Microsoft has refreshed the Suite navigation and app launcher feature in the latest release of the SharePoint server.

8. Explain Windows SharePoint Services?

Windows SharePoint Services is a portal-based platform used for information sharing, document collaboration, and customized web services. It is available for free with Windows server 2003. As a platform, it makes use of Windows Server, ASP.Net, and IIS.

Also, it supports webmasters with the development and deployment of applications; locates and shares the documents in a distributed environment.

9. How is the Site template different from the Site definition?

Site templates are pre-built functions designed based on particular business needs. These templates are useful for creating and customizing the SharePoint site.

Whereas, Site definition is mainly a combination of XML or ASPX files that contain information about necessary components. It stores information about libraries, web files, navigation bars, and features to be included on the site.

10. What is SharePoint Sandbox, and why is it used?

Sandbox runs in an isolation area while the normal functions of SharePoint operate as usual. It brings stability to the SharePoint farm by restricting the actions that can cause performance, security, and other related issues. 

Explore SharePoint New Features

11. What are the common differences between SharePoint 2007 and 2010?

• Service Applications
• Sandboxed Solutions
• Developer Dashboard
• Throttling and List Controls
• Business Connectivity Services
• Claims-Based Authentication

12.  What is a module in SharePoint?

A module is a file or group of file instances used to define the location of files during the site creation and also to implement a web part page.

13. What are the different input forms to create a workflow in SharePoint?

• Association form
• Initiation form
• Modification form
• Task edit form

14. What is SSS in SharePoint?

SSS stands for secure store service, which is a database to store credentials of the application IDs.

15. What are service application groups used for?

They provide a logical grouping of services scoped for a particular web application.

16. What authentication is used by the SharePoint crawler, and what is a federated location in SharePoint search?

The SharePoint crawler used NTLM authentication. Federated locations offer information available outside of the internal network to the end-users.

17. Which Microsoft tool can be used for incremental backup?

System center data protection manager

18. Name some of the tools used for backing up the SharePoint 2010 environment?

• SQL server
• System center data protection manager
• SharePoint farm backup and recovery

19. What are a site and MySites?

A site contains web pages and several assets such as lists related to it, whereas MySites are the personalized and targeted SharePoint for every user.

20. What is the site hierarchy model in SharePoint?

• Farm
• Web Application
• Site Collection
• Web Site
• Library/List

Learn SharePoint Tutorial

21. What is STSADM and what it is used for?

It is a command-line tool that was added to SharePoint in the year 2010. It exists in the 14HIVE>BIN folder and is used to create a new site collection.

22. What are the three editions for SharePoint 2010?

Three editions for SharePoint 2010

1. Foundation  
2. Server Standard   
3. Server Enterprise

23. What are cumulative updates and why they are needed?

These are the periodic release of software updates for SharePoint containing solutions for issues developed since the last cumulative update release. It is crucial to install the latest edition to ensure the full functionality of SharePoint.

24. What is the difference between the SharePoint portal server and the site server?

The basic differences between the SharePoint server and Site server are as follows:

SharePoint portal server

Web site creation for data sharing and document collaboration

SharePoint server services are the key information worker infrastructure to offer additional functionality to the MS office system.

Site server

Manages websites with multiple technologies

Order processing, content management, production management, etc.

25. What are the software and hardware requirements of SharePoint 2010?

Hardware requirements:

• Processor 64-bit, four-core, 2.5 GHz minimum per core
• 4 GB RAM for evaluation use, 8 GB for single and multiple server farm installation 
• The hard disk of 80 GB for production use and additional space for daily operation

Software requirements:

• 64-bit edition of Windows server 2008 with SP2

Explore Sharepoint Information Architecture Detail Guide

26. Is it possible to download information directly from a SharePoint site to a PDA?

No, that is not possible.

27. How to make the site public in SharePoint?

By default, all sites are private. To make it public, a user has to enable anonymous access for the entire site. Under each website, a user can create ten sub-sites, each having unique permissions

28. What is a.ddf file and why it is used in SharePoint solution creation?

In SharePoint, a.ddf is a data directive file used while specifying the source files and their destination locations.

29. What is CAML in SharePoint, and why is its use?

CAML (Collaborative Application Markup Language) is an XML-based language used in SharePoint to define the fields and views in sites and lists

30. What is impersonation in SharePoint?

It is basically a functionality where something is executed in the context of a different identity such as giving anonymous access to users for the account.

31. While fetching List items using SharePoint Web Services, how to specify explicit credentials to access the list items?

To specify explicit credentials, instantiate the web service, and then using the credentials properties use the System.Net.NetworkCredential class and give the username, password, and domain as per your wish.

32. What does SPWeb.EnsureUser method used for?

It is used to check whether the specified login name is associated with the valid user of the Web site or not. If not, it adds it to the Web site.

33. What does RunWithElevatedPrivileges do?

To bypass the access-denied error, RunWithElevatedPrivileges is used by a non-privileged user. Users can call the RunWithElevatedPrivileges method provided by the SPSecurity class to make a call into the object model.

34. How to create a Task Notifications Workflow in SharePoint?

• Create a new task list workflow
• Set the condition to "if the current item priority is high."
• Set the action to "send an email." 
• Define that the email should be sent to the email address of "Assigned To"
• Enter an e-mail subject with a lookup to the current item task name.
• Add a link to the ID of the current task and task list's edit form in the email body
• Publish the workflow.

35. Explain how to create a list in SharePoint 2013?

• Go to the settings menu and tap on the “Add an app” link to add a custom list
• Apps section under “Site Contents” will be opened
• Click on “Custom List” under your Apps
• Add a description and the name of the list to create a list in SharePoint

36. What does the content database handle in SharePoint?

• The Microsoft SharePoint database handles the following things-
• Published reports
• Reports models
• Shared data sources
• Properties
• Resources
• Permissions

37. How to manage projects in SharePoint?

To manage projects, SharePoint offers many facilities to users such as

• Dashboards: The dashboards include customs KPIs; reports and graphs
• Scheduling tools: used to update and assign multi-level tasks  
• Personalization: Filter out tasks that don’t affect your project
• Resources: To track cost, display availability, and other related data for hours worked
• Alerting: To alert about various activities important m

38. Why we use the Callout function in SharePoint 2013?

SharePoint Callout is used to make several types of commands on the SP(add a new item, update and make site navigation links). The user can append a new record to the SP list without the need to open the default add new SP list item dialogue box.

39. What is a document library in SharePoint?

The document library stores list of files and folders where a user can find out who created which file and can add, download, edit, delete a folder or file from a SharePoint document library.

40. How to create a document library in SharePoint?

• Open a web browser and log into SharePoint.
• Click Site Actions and select Create.
• Under Libraries, click Document Library.
• Enter name and description for the library
• Click Create.

41. What are the noticeable changes in SharePoint 2016 and SharePoint 2019 from their previous versions?

SharePoint 2016 has the following improved features as compared to its old versions - Durable, fast site collection creation, Main role, Hybrid search, Shortcut keys for Document library functions links.

SharePoint 2019 has got these features - Modern view for pages, SharePoint online has been introduced, New home page to create sites from the different web application.

42. What is Oauth?

Oauth is open-source authentication used to access third-party apps on the Sharepoint site. Third-party apps use the access tokens to fetch data from the SharePoint server for that user.

43. What is the difference between backup/restore and export/import?

Backup/restore is used for site-level, whereas import/export is used for a list and item level.

44. How ULS logs and IIS logs are different?

IIS logs store all data related to HTTP requests made by users. ULS logs will contain details once the user is validated by IIS. It stores all details such as SharePoint services and applications.

45. What does remove-spouse do in SharePoint?

It removes a user or security group completely from the site.

46. What are the crawl types in SharePoint?

Crawl is the process of accumulating content for search. To fetch the information, the crawl component connects to the content sources and passes crawled items to the content processing component. There are three main types of SharePoint Crawl - Full Crawl, Continuous crawl, and Incremental crawl. 

During the full crawl, the search engine crawls to index each item regardless of previous crawl status. The incremental crawler will enable the crawler to cover only newly created or modified items. Continuous crawl regularly checks the items after every 15 minutes and takes instant action and sends it to the content processor.

47. List some of the SharePoint online PowerShell commands?

• get-sposite
• Set-sposite
• Get-spouser
• Set-spouser
• Remove-spouser

48. Is Office 365 an IAAS or SAAS or PAAS?

SAAS

49. List out some SharePoint site monitoring tools?

•  Application Insights
•  SCOM
• Appdynamics
• OfficeMax

50. What is the threshold limit of subsites in a site in SharePoint 2016 and 2019?

2000

51. What is the limit of the SharePoint list or library, and what happens if we increase the limit?

The threshold limit for SharePoint list is 5000, which means when a user clicks/ opens a document library or list, he/she can see 5000 items at a time. If the limit is increased, it will display more, but performance will be affected. 

52. Which version of Excel supports co-authoring?

Excel 2016

53. Explain the difference between the team site and the communication site in SharePoint?

Team site is a private site used to store documents of particular team activities whereas a communication site is dedicated to customers and all company members and is used to publish details of the new products and services offered by the company. 

54. How much memory is needed for distributed cache and what will happen if it is stopped?

When the SharePoint server is installed, it allows ten percent of the total physical memory to distributed cache. If the distributed cache is stopped, the user will see runtime error, access denied page loading slowly, no newsfeed, and so on.

Explore OneDrive Vs SharePoint

55. What are the OneDrive sync issues?

OneDrive is a cloud solution to store your data file securely so that you can access it from anywhere. Sometimes, a user might face OneDrive SharePoint sync issues due to-

• Sync conflicts
• Item threshold
• No metadata sync
• Inability to sync individual folders

SharePoint Online Interview Questions for Experienced Developers

56.  How to provide access to Gmail account to the SharePoint online site?

First of all, enable external sharing on the site. Once it is enabled, users can be added to the site. Users will receive the invitation in their Gmail and should accept the invitation to login to the site.

57. What does the Request Management service feature is used for?

The request Management feature present in SharePoint 2013 handles incoming requests by evaluating logic rules to determine what/which action to take, and which machine in the farm should handle the incoming requests.

58. In a workflow, how method activity and event activity are different?

When we perform some actions like creating or updating a task is called a method activity. An event activity is the one that occurs in response to an action.

59. What is the purpose of the WebPartManager sealed class?

WebPartManager is known as the central class of the Web Part Control Set and is responsible for everything occurring on a WebPart Page such as events, controls, and functionalities.

60. What is the ideal location to initialize new controls while creating a WebPart?

Override the CreateChildControls method to initialize new controls. Also, you can control the exact rendering by calling the Render method in web parts.

61. How to create links for mapped network drives?

Links can be created to mapped drives in MOSS 2007 or  WSS v3 via new content type for Ink files

62. While creating a list definition, how to create an instance of the list?

New instance of a list can be created by an instance of. XML file

63. What is an ancestral type and how it is related to content types?

It is a base type from where the content type is derived. An ancestral type defines the metadata fields within the custom content type. 

64. What is Secure Store Services (SSS)?

It is a secure database that stores credentials associated with the application IDs.

65. What are site columns?

Site columns are the pre-defined data columns that are reused in several content types. 

66. Which command is used to take backup and restore the SharePoint site?

A command used for Backup:

stsadm -o backup -url http://moss:4002/ -filename c:bkupsite.bak

Command to restore :

stsadm -o restore -url http://moss:4004/ -filename c:bkupsite.bak

67. What is the difference between BCS and BDC?

BCS stands for Business Connectivity Services and it is used to perform read and write into the external database. BDC stands for Business Data Connectivity and it is used to perform read operations from the external database.

68. What is the difference between List and Library?

Library is used to store documents and a list is the container of similar items stored in the form of rows and columns. We cannot create a document in a list but we can attach a list to a document.

69. Why do we use SharePoint?

SharePoint is used by most organizations for 

• Business Intelligence: To organize data and make better business decisions based on different queries and data insights
• Share Documents: This BI tool allows us to store and share the documents with various members within and outside the team simultaneously.
• Collaboration: Through SharePoint, a user can collect data from various sources
• Document Management: With the help of this amazing tool, you can manage your document with more security and authenticity. For eg., it is in your hand that to whom give access (read, write, modify, delete, etc.) to a particular document. 

70. How many days are SharePoint online sites backed up?

14 days

71. What are the primary features of SharePoint?

With every update, SharePoint is becoming better than its previous version. Here, we will be discussing some of the basic features of SharePoint. 

• Sites: It offers the ability to create, store, and retrieve data along with searching for content, documents, and information. You also have connectivity into the Microsoft Office 2013 client applications through the list and document library.
• Social: Provides social networking capabilities, profile searching, and tagging, and news feeds along with the capability to search, locate, and interact with people.
• Content: Allows to explore, search, and manage content using Web pages, apps, workflow, or content types.
• Search: It offers the ability to search content inside and outside of SharePoint in a dynamic way with real-time document views through Office Web Apps. 
• Insights: Helps to integrate Microsoft Access into SharePoint; allows accessing dashboards and key performance indicators to transform raw data into actionable information; drag Excel and SQL Server to fetch and display data on a Web page.

72. What is WSP?

WSP ie. Wen Solution Package is basically a file that contains information about images, resources, site definitions, and many other features mixed with the site.

73. What is the difference between the team site and the communication site?

Team Site	Communication Site
Many Editors	Few Editors
Selected audience	Wide audience
A group of people can collaborate and work together	Only a few people can collaborate and work
Automatically creates an office 365 group, OneNote, Mailbox, etc	Contains only communication site

74. Office 365 is IAAS or SAAS or PAAS?

Office 365 is SAAS

75. How are CustomMasterUrl and MasterUrl different from each other?

• CustomMasterUrl: used to change the layout of admin pages.
• MasterUrl: used to change the layout of all end-user pages.

76. What do you understand by MOSS?

Mossie. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server is a complete version of a portal-based platform used for creating, managing, collaborating, and sharing documents as well as web services.

77. What are the tools used to get back up of a SharePoint 2010 environment?

• SharePoint farm backup and recovery
• SQL Server

78. What is FBA authentication?

FBS stands for Form-Based Authentication which is a process where a user has to fill all the credentials presented in a custom HTML page. If credentials are right as per the web application, then the user gets access.

79. How to resolve the issue when no search results are shown for the existing content?

Follow the steps to resolve the issues

• Browse to the affected SharePoint Online site.
• Click on the Settings menu, and select Site settings.
• Under Site Collection Administration, select Search Result Sources
• After that, ensure that Local SharePoint Results has the default checkmark assigned to it.
• If not, click the drop-down arrow for Local SharePoint Results, and Set as Default.

80. What is a hybrid search in SharePoint?

With this amazing feature in SharePoint, a user can search files and documents across Microsoft 365 and SharePoint server simultaneously

81. How to remove a user from the SharePoint site collection and user profile list?

• Site Settings > People & Groups
• Edit the URL and the "MembershipGroupId=<nn>" to "MembershipGroupId=0"
• Select the radio box  and click Actions > Delete Users from Site Collection
• To remove the user profile from the SharePoint Admin Center.
• Start the SharePoint Online management shell.
• Run: Connect-SpoService https://domain-admin.sharepoint.com
• Sign in with a global administrator account.
• Check the user account you want to remove by running: Get-SPOExternalUser -Filter <emailaddress>
• Run: $user = Get-SPOExternalUser -Filter <emailaddress>
• Run: Remove-SPOExternalUser -UniqueIDs @($user.UniqueId)

82. How to activate audit log settings in Sharepoint online site?

Go to Site->Site settings->Audit log settings->Select the box which is required.

83. For how many days deleted content is present in the recycle bin?

The deleted content remains for 30 days in the recycle bin.

84. Differentiate between auto-hosted, provider-hosted, and SharePoint-hosted?

• Auto Hosted apps are cloud-hosted apps
• Provider Hosted apps are deployed and hosted outside the Sharepoint Farm
• SharePoint hosted apps are the apps that are hosted either on-premise or on office 365 SharePoint farm

85. What is Alternate Access Mapping in SharePoint?

Alternate access mappings provide different URLs for the same SharePoint site. It was implemented due to the common scenarios where the URL of a web request received by IIS differs from the URL typed by the user.

86. How the Edit and Contribute permissions are different from each other? 

• Edit: With the help of Edit permission, a user can add, delete, and edit lists; can view, add, delete, and update list items and documents.
• Contribute: With contribute permission, a user can view, add, delete, and update the list of items and documents.

87. What is a timer job?

A timer job is a job that is executed periodically. For eg, sending of emails after regular intervals, data updation every day, creation of reports every week, etc. 

88. What is the maximum limit for a content database per farm?

A farm can have a maximum of 500 content databases.

89. List out the migration tools?

• Sharegate
• AvePoint
• Metalogic

90. Differentiate between SharePoint and Confluence?

A confluence is a bottom-up approach whereas Sharepoint is a top-bottom approach and allows add-ons from third parties too. There is no controlled intranet and microblogging in Confluence. 

91. List out some of the commands in the Teams module?

• New-Team
• New-Team channel
• Set-Team
• Set-Team channel
• Disconnect-MicrosoftTeams

92. List out some of the commands in the Powerapps module?

• Get-PowerAppEnvironment
• Get-Flowenvironment
• Get-Flow
• Enable-Flow
• Disable-Flow

That's all for now! Now it's your turn, How did you like SharePoint interview questions, just share your thoughts in the comment section. 

Also, do write if you have any queries regarding SharePoint topics, we will surely provide the solution for it.