In Praise of Mindsharp's Power End User Training for SharePoint

Four days of SharePoint training in Philadelphia and many cheesesteaks later, I am not at all worried about the week of work that I missed.  Why?  Even though I've returned to a mountain of work that piled up in my absence, the MindSharp training was completely worth it.  This thought was reinforced when another attendee exclaimed, "Our company spent 2 weeks to solve this!" after the instructor explained a quick fix for that attendee's particular problem.

Our class used SharePoint in a virtual environment and had the opportunity to learn SharePoint while not worrying about crashing the server or causing catastrophic data loss.  We worked with lists, document libraries, Web Parts, workflows, wikis, site administration, security, search, custom columns, and much more over the four-day Mindsharp Power End User course.  

One small trick I learned that I'd like to share involves a best practice for a wiki site:  From the initial wiki page you are writing, add [[Add text here]] to the current wiki page and save the page.  The inside of the double brackets becomes a hyperlink and the text inside will be the display text of that link.  If you click on the link, it will automatically create a new wiki page for you!

The most important lesson I took away from class is that SharePoint is a great technology with almost limitless capabilities, but without proper training and preparation, it can turn into a huge mess very quickly.  Attending MindSharp training was like being immersed in an interactive SharePoint manual.  I have only briefly touched SharePoint at work so far, but the time and effort I will save myself and coworkers as a result of having attended Mindhsarp training will really add up going forward. 

Thanks, Mindsharp!