Before I started to fully work with SharePoint I worked as Project Communicator in IT-Change Projects.  That often involved everything from creating communication plans to writing the communication material or even creating the e-learning.

In my seminars and workshops I often referee to one specific project that was particularly successful when it comes to end user satisfaction. You might think that this project was less complex but it was actually the opposite, it was a global and very complex outsourcing project. The reason for why this was so successful was because the CIO from the start stated that the project focused on three things: Communication, communication and communication. I have to say that as a Communication Manager this was probably the funniest project I participated in. We got time, resources and money to be able to do the good job, but most important communication and education was prioritized.

So, why do I talk about successful outsourcing projects? Well, it’s not about the outsourcing, it’s about the communication and education that too often get pushed aside in IT projects and especially in implementations of SharePoint. As I wrote in my post 5 steps to a successful SharePoint deployment Microsoft are great when it comes to making user friendly applications, but SharePoint is a new way of working and the communication and education needs to be good if you want to make some ROI on your implementation.

So here are some options (no perticular order) you have when it comes to end user education.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 training
Microsoft has created an end user training to you can download for free. It’s made in two versions one standalone edition and one Portal editionthat you can add to your sharepoint environment so that it’s available to your end users. Both versions has the same content and provides guides both with text and video how to perform different tasks in SharePoint.  This is only available in English and you might need to tweak it and add custom content to make it customized to your environment but it’s a very good start off point.

Compilation of good resources
Depending on the size of you implementation and the skills of your end users it might be possible to compile a set of useful links and to use the built in help to get “good-enough” education. However I have never experiences any larger company that has (and I fully support them) only used this approach towards end users and this is not something I recommend if you’re not a small group of people that already are familiar with SharePoint. On the other hand there are a couple of good sites to provide your end users if they want to know more about SharePoint. Sites I recommend are: Office online and Mark Miller’s End User SharePoint,

External e-learning provider
There are a number of external e-learning providers that can probably help you tailor an education that exactly fits your needs. The flipside of this is that it’s often quite expensive. Even if they say that they can provide you with an off-the-shelf education, it’s very important that you in the education describe your structure and thoughts on how to work with your specific environment. This is not something that could be taken off the shelf since every implementation always has its own structure and customization as well as guidelines on how to work whit your environment.

Screen recordings
A good alternative is to make custom screen recordings and package it to an e-learning application, this might sound complicate but now days these tools are relatively cheap and makes it easy to quickly create content that you have full control over. There are a couple of tools such as Camtasia or my personal favorite Adobe Captivate (that just recently released version 4) available for trial download if you want to see how they work. The best thing with these tools is that when you have created your recording you can afterwards add texts and adjust the speed, add interactivity and quizzes. In a coming post I will write about how to use Adobe Captivate to create a simple e-learning application that together with the SharePoint Learning Kit can track the end users results.

Microsoft Software Assurance training
If your company has a Software Assurance license with Microsoft you are able to get a free e-learning material from Microsoft. The education is quite good and comes in a format where you need to have an LMS server. If you don’t have an LMS server it’s possible to use the SharePoint Learning Kitfrom CodePlex that is Scorm certified. Talk to your contact at Microsoft if you have the Software Assurance license and they will help you with the files. You should however add some kind of introduction to your environment with how you have structured your information and what information that should be stored where.

Do you have any other experiences or good resources to use when educating the end users I’m more the happy to hear from you.