It's day three, which means this is the exciting conclusion to my semi-live-blogging of the Mindsharp Power End User summit in Washington, D.C. (If you missed the first two installments, here are the direct links to day one and day two.) As previously noted, however, though this is my wrap-up post on the actual training proper, you can expect (at least!) several weeks worth of posts which will be a direct result of my having attended the Mindsharp training. I've got a head full of new learning, and a whole lot of pages of a notebook filled with my scrupulous notes taken over the last three days, and I aim to share what I learned here, in the SharePoint Blank tradition.
Lead instructor Janis Hall (who was indeed the lead instructor in both name and deed, having only handed over the reins to proctor Nancy Kabakjian for the final module of the first day) adeptly piloted the ship that was our class through all of the remaining modules of the syllabus today. This was a remarkable feat to have accomplished given that, a) we began day two well behind schedule, b) the course content could easily have taken up another day (or two), and, c) our class was both sizable and vocal. And yet, in Hall's capable hands –with a nonpareil assist from her proctors, Kabakjian, and Sharee English– we cruised through the final day of the syllabus without ever feeling rushed, or that topics were being given short shrift. Friends, if you're in the market for intensive End User training, I'd suggest you owe it to yourself (and your organization) to look to Mindsharp. In particular, you can't go wrong with any of these three instructors at the helm, and if you're lucky enough to attend a summit with all three of them present, consider yourself triply blessed.
So what was included in today's roundup of modules? That would be: Introduction to Site Owner Administration; Secure a SharePoint Site; Content Types; Manage Workflows; Site Administration; and using WSS and Collaborative Sites. Sticking with yesterday's water-based metaphor for learning, if today's information had issued from a hose, it wouldn't have been a garden hose, but a fire hose.
As a final note on today's class, check this out: I was actually able to contribute a small amount of information (that I had learned in the process of my SharePoint Blank-based self-learning, no less) to the class discussion. It's true, I swear! In answer to a question posed by another participant regarding what would happen if you set a workflow task to be due on the day the workflow was initiated, I was able to chime in and explain that once the workflow is initiated, the person tasked would receive an email informing them that they are already late with their assigned task. A fact which many in the class found to be quite amusing, by the way.
Could it be that "our little SharePoint Blank baby's all growns up!"? On the other hand, what was it that I realized just yesterday about hubris?
Either way, stay tuned. Thanks to our friends at Mindsharp, I've now got an entire arsenal of new tricks to perform for your entertainment!
Posted
Aug 13 2008, 06:48 PM
by
John Anderson
John Anderson joined Bamboo Solutions as Manager of Content & Syndication in May 2008 after a 12-year career at AOL. New to SharePoint at the time of his hiring, John was tasked with creating a new blog for the just-launched Bamboo Nation community in which he would document his daily SharePoint learning process. Thus was born the end user-centric SharePoint Blank, for which John authored 200 posts within a year, and which he continues to write today. John writes SharePoint Blank in addition to his responsibilities as Bamboo Nation's de facto managing editor and, while he has learned much about SharePoint in his first year, he gleefully awaits the release of SharePoint 2010, and the reset button that release will represent for SharePoint Blank.