Proffesional services vs Application

Question

Hi,
We are trying to decide the responsibilities of our application team (developers and application specialists) VS the professional services team.
Our application team know the sharepoint Central Admin very well and config all the services themselves but so does the PS team, we try finding a microsoft best practice on who should manage the farm (App or PS team) but cant find one.
We feel that the PS team shuold install the farms, service packs, deal with hardware and communication issues and leave the ongoing CA manage to the App team simply beacuase the App team is the one building the application and they know exactly what is needed.
Is there a MS best practice ?
Who manage the Central Admin in your organization ?

Answer 1

The role of maintaining and updating SharePoint should be entirely defined by the business it serves to serve. This is one of the cases where 'best practice' is an unhelpful term as the best solution for one company may be radically different to anothers.
I would lean towards the PSG group, by forcing the Devs to hand over to another seperate group it tends to enforce a higher standard of code (or so goes the theory) and forces them to make sure that documentation and processes are right before trying a deployment.
Secondly while a developer might know SharePoint's front end and administration model well they shouldn't know it as well as a SharePoint administrator.
In the end the administration of SharePoint often ends up with neither the PS or App teams but the IT support team, who often have the least SharePoint knowledge of the three but are better geared up for the support role. If your PS team is heavily utilised
then it can take a long time to get even simple things scheduled in and the same goes for Developers.