Last week I was away training in London – hence the last of posts on the tail of last week. I was at ‘Xpertise’ in London, although the training was being provided by Ruth Jennaway on behalf of Ted Pattison Group. The course itself was SPT 401 – Inside SharePoint Products and Technologies, though I can’t find this on their website.
Anyway, the training was pretty good. I found that I got a lot more from the start of the course (which focussed on WSS3) than the later bit which focussed more on MOSS; I’ve been surprised a couple of times by just how much there is and how much you can do with WSS (and it is practically free!) The MOSS stuff is a bit more familiar – but it’s the MOSS stuff that I’ve been working with mostly.
The course started with a brief introduction/history of SharePoint, looked at what type of developer and background you might have coming to SharePoint, and then into architecture. The rest of the modules were then pretty much what you’d expect:
- Development vs Customisation, how Features work
- SharePoint Architecture and how pages work
- Pages and Site Branding
- Developing Web Parts
- Lists and Content Types
- InfoPath 2007 and Forms Services
- SharePoint Workflows
- Extending MOSS Portals and Search
- Web Content Management
- Business Data Catalog
- Excel Services and Reports Center
- Application Security
The lab exercises were good, and pretty realistic. The workflow one seemed a bit light, and none went into that much detail, but then again, some of these areas could be a week’s training in their own right (and I notice that Ted Pattison Group do offer a 4 day workflow course…). It was all quite pragmatic; I liked it.
The other things I took away were a bit less directly about the course. Firstly, there is value in having a course run over its originally intended time. The last two SharePoint courses I’ve been on were two weeks reduced to one, and 5 days reduced to 2. The first had me studying from 8am to 11pm most days, and the second just didn’t cover as much as it could have; it’s quality was compromised. Getting the instructor to talk twice as quickly does not make me learn twice as much. This course benefitted from a reasonable pace and scope.
The second thing I took away was the quality of the trainer. For development training, the trainer has to be another developer, even if it isn’t full time. Ruth, who took this course, was very good; she’d clearly been at the sharp end of SharePoint development and felt the pain, and was willing to say ‘I don’t know’, which anyone working with SharePoint will have to say sometime or another. Anyway, she kept the course filled with useful tips and clarifications; I hope I supplied some back myself. Previously some of my colleagues have had trainers who are trainers, not devs – this was not as good
I do think that I would have taken more away from this course if I’d not already worked so extensively with SharePoint – it’s perhaps a better course for folks who’re relatively new to SharePoint development. It was also fairly clear that being a strong ASP.NET developer would really help too; I’ve said it before, but I think good ASP.NET 2.0 skills are an essential prerequisite to SharePoint development.