If your job responsibilities include administering SharePoint at all, you’ll most likely want to find some good quality training. That’s true whether you are the administrator of the whole SharePoint farm, a site collection, or even just a site. SharePoint is one of those technologies that is not just “intuitively obvious,” and it takes a great deal of planning and knowledge of best practices to get the best results. SharePoint training will help you to get better results as you perform your job duties, and it will also enhance your career if you’re just studying independently.

SharePoint is as vast as it is complex, so although there are many training classes you can pay for down the line, you may as well get started with the free resources that are available! Then once you’ve had a good tour of the whole thing you can target your SharePoint training dollars toward the particular area of responsibility you’ll have, whether it’s farm administration, SharePoint development, business intelligence, or other SharePoint tasks.

Online SharePoint Training

If you’re interested in a two-hour online SharePoint 2010 training clinic from Microsoft, absolutely free, be sure to check out Clinic 10279: What’s New in Microsoft SharePoint 2010 for IT Professionals and Clinic 10277: What’s New in Microsoft SharePoint 2010 for Developers.

All you have to do to get started is to read and accept the End User License Agreement then click to activate your course. You’ll need a Windows Live ID, which is the same ID you use if you have Hotmail, MSN Messenger, or a Passport account. If you don’t already have one of those, you can sign up for a Windows Live ID right there. As soon as you activate the class, you can get started immediately!  You’ll also receive an email for your records, welcoming you to Microsoft E-Learning and telling you which courses you have access to and when they expire. Currently these two clinics expire one year after you activate them.

If your course appears as a blank window while trying to view it online, then instead put a check in Select All then click to Download Selected Items. You’ll then be able to quickly download and install the E-Learning Offline Player. After downloading your course, you can play it any time you like, locally on your own computer. You can periodically synchronize back to Microsoft Learning so that you can track your progress on the Microsoft site.

SharePoint Learning Snacks

Learning Snacks are videos made by members of the Microsoft community, and they’re quite helpful at getting a look at how to do various topics.  Three SharePoint 2010 learning snacks that are currently available include Managing and Troubleshooting with Microsoft SharePoint 2010, Experiencing the Microsoft SharePoint 2010 User Interface, and Developing Solutions with Microsoft SharePoint 2010.

Hands-On Virtual SharePoint Labs

Ready to try some of the SharePoint tasks you’ve been learning about? You can get some real hands-on experience with SharePoint through the Technet Virtual Lab series. Currently there are 30 full-featured TechNet Virtual Labs for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 covering everything from Windows PowerShell to the installation, configuring, monitoring, upgrade, and backup of SharePoint, to using business data connectivity, and many more topics.  There are also a few labs devoted to SharePoint 2007 and 2003.

These are strictly virtual labs you’ll run through your own browser, so there’s no software to install or worry about on your own computer. It’s the best of all worlds because you’ll be using a virtual server experience designed and installed by Microsoft, yet you can do it in the comfort of your own home or office any time of the day or night you find convenient.

Each module comes with a downloadable lab manual and a 90 minute block of time to complete it.  After 90 minutes, the lab will end (and your changes will not be saved), but you can always start a new session on the same or another topic at any time.  Especially if you don’t have a SharePoint sandbox farm of your own, these labs are a great place to try out the things you’re learning in a very safe environment. Even if you do have a sandbox, since these labs are already installed and configured for you, you can get straight to the topic you want to study instead of having to waste time installing and configuring everything else.

There are actually even more great quality free SharePoint training resources out there, but if you cover all of the items I’ve talked about here you’ll be well on your way to having a good grasp of SharePoint and the recommended ways to approach your duties.

On Valentine’s Day, the UPS man dropped off a suspicious package. I wasn’t expecting anything, and there was really no indication on the outer box to tell me who it was from. Once I opened the inner box though, I started to get excited…could this be a Chrome notebook? I’d registered for Google’s Chrome Notebook Pilot Program just over a couple of weeks before, but I hadn’t received an email telling me I’d been selected or rejected.

Turns out it was a Cr-48, and I happily unboxed it and opened it up. The Chrome operating system booted up spectacularly fast, and then I connected to my wireless network and was asked to go through a quick setup, where I signed in with my Google account and allowed the notebook to take a quick picture of me. That picture is used as an icon for my own user account, and I can create other user accounts if family or friends want to use it regularly. For the casual friend who just wants to take it for a spin, I use the built-in Guest account.

I agreed to use this as my regular computer and to report any bugs or good things back to Google often, and believe me, I do so with great pleasure.  When the notebook is powered on, the Chrome OS starts up quickly and the Chrome browser is automatically opened. Life exists in that browser, pretty much. There’s no desktop, no corrupted folders or outdated apps, none of what we’re accustomed to. In fact, Chrome updates itself from the web if updates are available. The Cr-48 is just the right size for balancing lightly on my knees on the couch or sitting with it pretty much anywhere. And I certainly don’t miss waiting for Windows Vista to boot up and get logged in! There’s no Caps Lock key on this keyboard, but instead there’s a key that opens up a new tab in the Chrome browser.  The brave can get to a command line if they want to talk a little more intimately to their Cr-48 with Linux commands, but so far I’ve only done that once, to see what was there.

I’ve used online banking, Zoho and Google apps, Gmail and Yahoo mail, online shopping, Evernote notebooks, and many other online avenues for a long time, because I tend to work on those things in various places and never wanted to worry about which computer my documents were on or my mail client was installed on.

The Chrome notebook has been wonderful. A few days ago I created a new niche site, and that included exporting my Thesis settings out of this blog and then importing into the new site so that I wouldn’t have to insert the custom code for the header look or worry about the colors for the other areas.  The little notebook handled that task just fine, sending downloads into my Downloads folder (always accessible by Ctrl-o) and automatically retrieving the Downloads folder when it was time to upload the file into the new site’s Thesis settings.

I’m not usually one to print a lot of stuff, but when I did have to produce a paper document I was able to do that easily using Google Cloud Printing. Essentially I just had to sign into Google on my old desktop PC and activate the Google Cloud Print connector in the Google Chrome browser. Now the local printers for that PC are available to the notebook.

How can you get a Cr-48? There’s a questionnaire at the site of the Chrome Notebook Pilot Program, and it will ask you various questions to determine if you’re a good fit for the program.  Essentially you do need to be ready and willing to live on the web, and I’m soooo happy to comply.