There are many “off the shelf” SharePoint training programs.  These include online courses, computer based training and in classroom training sessions.

When we do training, we target the following audiences:

  • IT Staff
  • Developers
  • Site Owners (those with Design or Full Control)
  • Contributors

For generic training, there are some good training options for IT staff, developers and power users.  For example, companies like LearningTree offer a wide variety of courses on SharePoint.

These courses work well if you have a fairly generic SharePoint implementation.  However, if you have customized your implementation, your users will need to understand your version of the SharePoint platform.  Here are some of the typical “customized training” elements we incorporate into custom training for a SharePoint roll-out:

  • Customized permissions and roles
  • New workflows
  • Look and feel changes (e.g. new master pages)
  • Custom built web parts (e.g. how to operate them)
  • Taxonomy structure (in particular, managed metadata and content types that have been implemented for your organization)
  • Governance rules and guidelines
  • Search scopes and features
  • Page layouts
  • Site templates

As you can see by the list, the biggest challenge is at the Site Owner level – in a site where there are significant customizations done, they will need to understand how to incorporate these changes into their site design activities.  We typically do this through custom training designed for your organization that incorporates these custom features into the training program.

For IT staff and developers, they need to understand how any custom features have been implemented and deployed so that if there are bugs, issues, etc. they have a comprehensive understanding of how to fix them.  Again, this is not something that will be covered in generic SharePoint training, although having a good technical knowledge of the SharePoint platform certainly doesn’t hurt.  We typically recommend that they take a generic IT oriented training program and then we follow-up with specific knowledge transfer sessions to cover any implementation specific needs.

This post was written by Chris Woodill
Christopher Woodill is the Vice President, Public Sector for Navantis. With over 15 years of experience planning, managing and implementing technology strategies in both the public and private sector, Christopher is responsible for public sector sales, strategy and delivery of solutions for our clients in healthcare, government, municipalities and education.