Developer Training

Following on to my previous post, another observation that's been made out there is that our standard MOC courseware falls short of what many of you want/need. I'll respond in two ways:

First of all, the developer course is targeted at the introductory level. If it does a bad job of that, I'd be very interested in knowing why you feel that's true, and what we should do instead. Is the material incomplete? Do we stress some things more than we should and other things not nearly enough? We need feedback to fix it.

If you've taken the developer course and liked it, found it helpful and a good starting point, we'd love to hear that, too.

If you're concerned with a dearth of advanced training information, that's a valid point. The training partner community has been scrambling to address this (check out Barracuda.NET for one example of this -- but this is an example, not an endorsement, since there are many options for third-party training out there).

But I'm offering two options for helping to improve matters:

1. Definitely reply and tell me what the course should cover. MOC courseware is very expensive/time-consuming to create and/or revise, but we have to start sometime.

2. Perhaps we can create a community repository of training info that everyone could reuse, perhaps as a GotDotNet workspace. It would need to be very modular in nature to fit different audiences, and we'd need to be careful with some liability issues, but we could make it work, given sufficient interest. Content creation and review could be a cooperative effort between Microsoft and the community.

Thoughts?

--Fitz

Comments

  • Anonymous
    December 15, 2004
    Writing Secure Code
  • Anonymous
    December 15, 2004
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    December 15, 2004
    It is good to hear your interest in this area. A large group of us have been working to start up a virtual "Global User Group" to help address some of the gaps that exist in training and information for SharePoint for all various participants (admins, developers, users, site managers, sales).

    There are a lot of great "community" sites and weblogs and they have done and are continuing to do a lot of wonderful things for SharePoint. However a lot of answers still go unanswered. The primary goal of the user group will be to be the vehicle that connects people to answers by directing them to the various other sites, offering demostrations / training, answering questions, sharing experiences etc...

    The group should also not be mistaken for merely another website or portal - it will be an organization of individuals passionate about SharePoint and wanting to do more to help others understand SharePoint.

    The original post on the group was here but since a lot of people from all over the world have come on board and continue to do so each day:
    http://blog.funknstyle.com/archives/2004_10_08.html

    Currently the group is in a planning stage and a WSS site is being created to facilitate some of the initial collaboration for the working group.

    I'd be thrilled to add your name to the list of participants if you think you might be interested.
  • Anonymous
    December 16, 2004
    Welcome Mike to the blogosphere. Hope you are not mad at me :-)

    My suggestion for an update of the MOC are:

    - 5-day developer course with topics that smoothly guide the students through the various developer opportunities within SharePoint
    - 5-day IT course focused on deployment, administration and configuration

    As mentioned in the mail, SharePoint deserves two 5-day quality MOCS. We trainers we will make sure that the latest community work is mentioned during the course.
  • Anonymous
    December 16, 2004
    I actually wrote a blogentry about MOC8036a last week, go check it out ... http://jopx.blogspot.com/2004/12/sharepoint-moc-8036a.html

    Today I was giving MOC2014 and I have to say,... the most interesting stuff for the students was stuff such as the smartpart.
  • Anonymous
    December 16, 2004
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    December 16, 2004
    However I haven't seen any third party developer courses, I've had some feedback from customers (we developed our own Sharepoint developer, editor, designer and user courses) that wanted to see Sharepoint courses in some sort of higher level. This means, not just how to develop a webpart and place it on an area, but more how to get this webpart to work properly in a Sharepoint environment so it's more productive for knowledge workers. This means technically and functionally.

    Most Sharepoint developers want (and need) to be expert on as well core development as technical consultancy.

    Sharepoint is all about knowedge management and collaboration, it integrates well with other products, but I haven't seen any design patterns on this area yet. I think there is a need for that.

    Mart
  • Anonymous
    December 21, 2004
  1. Concentrate on SharePoint 200?
    2. Produce a really good SDK with lots of tiny samples.

    There’s a mass of info out there,
    For anyone suitably motivated theres tons of possibilities.

    Use what we've got. less talk shops and more assemblies.