SharePoint Training Pays Off

Brad Guzan is probably not a name known to many of you, but on Tuesday night he incredibly saved FOUR penalties for Aston Villa to help them beat Sunderland and reach the last eight of the Carling Cup. Yes he is Villa’s brilliant American goalkeeper named ‘Brad’, the one who isn’t Brad Friedel. So how did Mr. Guzan, who only plays in cup games, manage to save four penalties from four different players? He puts it all down to training and practicing saving penalties every day. So when you are thinking of how to get the best out of your SharePoint project team make sure you train them well because it will help your SharePoint Project succeed.

Make sure that all SharePoint Project Team members and any Super Users (always helpful for promoting SharePoint) are aware of exactly what SharePoint can do and have a good basic understanding of all the features. They might not be able to save Sunderland penalties, but they should know about all of the following;

1. Layout of SharePoint
2. Changing SharePoint Navigation
3. Creating SharePoint Sites
4. Adding Announcements, Contacts, Calendar and Task items
5. Uploading Documents and Images
6. Defining version control and document approval
7. Use Metadata and Site Columns
8. Creating Custom Lists
9. Creating and Editing Views
10. How to add Document Templates using Content Types
11. Best way to Search
12. Designing Surveys
13. Creating Alerts
14. Managing SharePoint User Rights

Apologies if the list above looks familiar to anybody who has been on the Office Talk SharePoint Super User one day course, but I thought I would reuse the list I cover in that course. Of course, I am always happy to run on-site SharePoint Training courses just send an email to frank.faulds@office-talk.com if you require any SharePoint training.

Whether the training is done by a SharePoint Consultancy, like Office Talk, or even just using some of the free on-line training from Microsoft it needs to be included in every SharePoint Project. SharePoint has many excellent features (like Content Types, recurring meetings, calculated fields), but if the main users don’t know about them the full return on investment of your SharePoint might never be reached. The extra training that Brad Guzan did on penalties might just mean that come next March the Villa are again parading around Wembley with a shining cup.

My SharePoint tip this week is to use the ‘Totals’ section on a View. If you create, or modify, an existing View then scroll down and you will have an option called ‘Totals’. Click on the ‘+’ to open the options. You can now on many of the columns add some basic calculations like ‘count’, ‘sum’ even ‘standard deviation’ (if I could only remember what that was about from my O’Level Maths). If you ‘group’ your columns first you can get some pretty impressive figures. Maybe not as impressive as saving four out of five penalties, but still very useful.

Now who is going to tell Brad Guzan that he is dropped for Saturday’s game at Everton?

Don’t forget for all your SharePoint Training needs visit Office Talk.