I will be traveling to Kuopio Finland today to educate end user and “editors” of a customers new Intranet. I have got the opportunity to teach end users, editors and in some cases also administrators in a various sessions and locations, but even if I have built up my own little “library” of material and kept quite a lot of them there is still a few things that always needs to be done in preparations. Especially if you have not been involved earlier in their environment. Therefore I thought I share a couple of things I do to prepare myself for these kind of training sessions to make the time useful for the participants

Find the right level
To find the right level and to meet the expectations, talk to some of the participants a couple of weeks before the education and ask about their expectations. Do a couple of small interviews and when you have them face-to-face or by phone you get a feeling of how much knowledge they already have about SharePoint and their technically skills in general.

Learn their environment
Get a good understanding of how they are using SharePoint. Do they have a intranet or are they only using the document management parts? Are they using Publishing sites or Team Sites? Maybe a combination and in that case you need to show how to access different settings in two ways. Do they have any customizations and other lock-downs of the system?

Learn their terminology
Do they have a name for their intranet, what are they calling their business units. This is very good to know so that you can referee to “real life” examples and so that they feel like you know a bit about them. Maybe they have other names then the SharePoint names for Sites and document lists. By using their names you will avoid confusions.

Plan content and time
Time is a luxury most people don’t have but if you rush through the education nothing will be remembered and the time spent useless. Plan the amount of time, think about what is actually important for them and don’t be afraid of divide the education into two different sessions if you have two groups with different knowledge or interests in SharePoint. Don’t teach Site collection administration tasks for end users or “simple” editors of news items.

Handouts
One of the most frequent sentence in emails today is “Consider the environmental effect do you really need to print this email?” and yes I have it in my signature as well. But some people really like to have something in their hands, and in most of the cases it’s also good to give them some reminders they can use when they get back to their office and try to remember what you just told them. My suggestion is to bring it in a digital format and for those that really need to have it in front of them can print it, and the others can use the digital version. There are thick books written about SharePoint so just put the absolute most important in there and make sure that all screenshots are made from their environment or at least looks like it.

If anyone by any change is in the neighbourhood of Kuopio Finland the coming two days, just send me a message and it would be nice to take a glass or two and talk SharePoint!