Sharepoint Training w/ Dunn Training and Sahil Malik

Training is typically a large investment b/c it's time intensive and trainers usually don't work cheap. This weekend, out company hired Dunn Training and Sahil Malik to get us up to speed on Sharepoint.  I can say that dealing with Dunn and Sahil was like buying a Lexus except not nearly as expensive.

Mark Dunn attended the training and was there  the whole time to help out. Sahil arrived right on time and from start to finish, he covered virtually every aspect of Sharepoint that one could care about.  I consider both Mark and Sahil good friends of mine but if I wasn't impressed with the training, I just wouldn't mention it. A good portion of our office showed up and Mark was kind enough to let me bring Kim.

The first few hours showed you how to use Sharepoint to do most of the common activities using the UI. Later in the afternoon, we started getting into coding tasks.  If you read Sahil's ADO.NET 2.0 book , you can tell the same guy that wrote that book built this courseware.  His stuff is thorough and fun and he keeps thing moving by keeping the laughs  rolling.

The first day was largely what you could call common Sharepoint tasks, today we've moved on to InfoPath and workflows.  Here's an outline of the courseware if you happen to be interested in it:

1. Introduction

2. Preparing a good SharePoint environment.

a. Development

b. Production

3. SharePoint security

a. Search

4. Content Types - A better way to manage your data

5. Recap

6. Leveraging VSeWSS - developing in a team environment

7. SharePoint as a WCM.

a. W3C compliant sites.

8. Writing Custom Web parts for SharePoint

9. Excel Services

10. InfoPath

11. Workflows in MOSS

a. Out of the box experience

b. SharePoint designer based workflows

c. Visual Studio based WFs

12. BDC

13. Administering and Monitoring SharePoint

To give you a feel for the audience, most of the folks were seasoned .NET developers.  A few were either purely or mainly DB admins or developers.  We had one technical writer and a tester.  A few of the devs were much more focused on Windows Forms as opposed to ASP.NET.  Only two of us had ever really done any Sharepoint development and only 4 of us had used Sharepoint 07 as an end user or dev. At the risk of sounding self-flattering, the group was pretty sharp but I would say that Sahil's approach would have worked well for just about any group you put in front of him.

Personally, I was strongest with three areas- Workflows , InfoPath and Excel Services. I had been lead technical editor on Alvin Bruney's Excel Services book and have been a worflow junkie since they came out.  InfoPath is just plain cool although I frequently feel like both of us that use it are freaks b/c it's hard to run into anyone that uses InfoPath.  In each aspect though, I definitely learned a few tricks.  Sahil's instruction on BI and KPI's within Excel was a big hit and I think everyone pretty much found the presentation very impressive.

The InfoPath coverage was pretty darned cool too and was pretty easy to pick up on even though hardly anyone had used it before.  Seeing what you can do with it and how easy it was proves that many tasks that required a developer to build before can be done by a power user although I suspect it's going to open many new doors for developers as power uses start digging into it.

So throughout the training, Sahil pointed out real world issues you'll end up dealing with and no doubt saved us from many pitfalls. In fact, the real world aspect is precisely one of the things that made this training so good.  He wasn't afraid to point out that not everything is perfect with respect to Sharepoint and went one step up by giving us resources to work arounds for such problems.

Training is a pretty big investment in terms of time and money. There's no shortage of snake oil peddlers offering to help you LearnAsp or learn some other product, the type of trainers who put a lot of effort into blowing their own horns but who aren't welcome back to any more work for people they've trained or worked for in the past.   Good training companies and trainers are hard to come by and before making an investment, you should really look around and talk to people that have dealt with the company and the trainer. Mark Dunn's company has the reputation they do b/c they've been around for a while and he is very picky about who deals with him.  Search the internet high and low and you won't find anything non-flattering about Mark Dunn or his people. You wont' find a bunch of marketing speil and grandiose self-promotion or claims on his site b/c his customers do the advertising for him.  In fact, we regularly use Mark Dunn's training for a whole variety of products and everything has always been top notch.  I know Sahil is booked up for quite a while but if you're looking for unequalled Sharepoint training, you should give him or Mark    a call.