Hello,

I am a former database programmer who will be developing a custom Sharepoint site for my research team.  It will be a learning project for me...

Having set up a couple minor Sharepoint sites before, I know that the current Sharepoint permissions I have through our IT dept. aren't gonna be enough for this site.  I'll need to be able to upload and save templates, for example, and at some point I'm gonna want to be able to get in there and write code/customize stuff more extensively than I'm able to now.

Since requesting stuff from our IT dept. is a drawn-out process, I'm hoping to not have to repeat the process too many times.  So I was wondering if any of you experienced folks out there have any suggestions about what I should ask for... Like, what kind of Sharepoint permissions/"user level" do you have, as a developer?  Do you use... I guess it's SDK?  Is there an HTML editor that you prefer to use with Sharepoint?  Stuff like that...

Anything, really, that can point me in the right direction would be appreciated -- if there's a site you think I should know about, something you suggest I read... 

I'll definitely be doing a lot of reading in the meantime, but I just want to get the IT request process going, since it'll probably take a while...

Thank you,
Shel