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!

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Administrator’s Companion

This book is the definitive guide to manage your Moss environment. I personally like Bill English way of writing and the book includes everything you need to know to get a good grip of end-to-end deployment. The book also includes a CD with job aids and you can also find get the book in e-book format.

Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007 Best Practices

If you have read it, you just have to. It’s another great book with Bill English and this time he has done it together with Ben Curry, both MVP’s. What’s also terrific with the book is the “Notes from the field” which is articles, blog post etc. from other prominent SharePoint People. The Best Practices book include everything from planning and governance to deployment, develop and operation.

Inside Microsoft Office SharePoint Server

This is a comprehensive hands-on book written by Patrick Tisseghem who sadly passed away last year. The book is not for beginners and expects some knowledge about both programming and SharePoint . It’s an easy to read book and has many and very good examples in it.

Professional SharePoint 2007 Web Content Management Development: Building Publishing Sites with Office SharePoint Server 2007

Probably the longest book title I have ever ready but if you want to get into Web Content Management with SharePoint, Andrew Connell’s book is for you. It includes everything you need to know. From beginning to end (is there an end?) and has great examples.

Real World Sharepoint 2007: Indispensable Experiences from 16 MOSS and WSS MVPs

16 MVP’s come together to share their knowledge can’t fail. The book is sort of an extension of what these people have done in their blogs and from within their specific SharePoint Field. It includes real world examples that in some cases requires quite a good knowledge about development, but if you are in the field, it’s a great book.

Since this is a Fivelist I need to stop know but I do like to also promote my fellow compatriot Göran Husman’s book. Beginning Sharepoint 2007 Administration: Windows Sharepoint Services 3.0 and Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007 (darn everyone has long titles…)

I also want to say that keep your eyes and ears open for more books coming up, and they might come up from places you have not expected. Promise to tell you more within the coming weeks…

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.