As promised (to myself and my coworkers, and I am sure to all the myriad of folks reading this blog) I am going to be posting a summation and observations from the SharePoint training I attended this week. It should be noted, this training is user training - not technical ... which makes it much more interesting to ME ... the users user. hmmm - that doesn't seem to make much sense. whatevs.

Day 1 (Contributor Training)

Audience: Team Members (viewing, adding, editing - not responsible for determining structure of site, etc)
Duration: 4 hours

Top Take-Aways for Me (related to my companies SP implementation) :

• Company provided users w/ a great tri-fold quick reference guide: included a high-level hit list of basic functions with-in SP (their guide is for MOSS 2007 so I will be developing on specifically for WSS 3.0)


• Course was designed specifically for users with little to no knowledge of SharePoint, very valuable offering - previously we were not considering doing one of these courses, but I could see taking pieces of it and offering via podcast or even being led by a Super-User


• There was a component of the class centered on the future of SP @ the company, used to reinforce the recommended/required usage for the tool based on companies guidelines - an absolute necessity

Course Outline:

Section 1: Intro to Sharepoint

What is SharePoint?

• Collaboration
• Central Document Mgmt
• Communication

How is SP used @ this company

Define different components of SP

Section 2: Working w/ SharePoint as a Member (Contributor)

Announcements

• uses for announcements
• add an announcement
• edit announcements (through drop-down & accessing the announcement directly)
• add alerts (alert me) - applies to all lists & doc libraries

Links

• uses for links
• add a link
• edit links

Deleting Content

• Delete content
• Access deleted content
• Restore content

Calendar

• When you would use this calendar (differs from Outlook calendar)
• add an occurence
• change calendar views

Tasks

• Why/when you use tasks
• Creating tasks (adding owners)
• Altering views

Document Library

• Create a new document (using pre-defined template)
• File naming (no special characters: # % / )
• Uploading single file
• Uploading multiple files
• Versioning (if enabled by Doc Library Owner)
• Opening w/ Windows Explorer
• Placing a Shortcut on Desktop

Discussions

• Post topics for discussion
• Reply to other posts
• Set alerts

Surveys

• Responding to surveys