Welcome to Kollabria SharePoint Business Professional™ Training.  

SharePoint is not an application, therefore it is not possible to learn how to work it as you would learn to work other applications. It does however have the ability to be configured for a wide variety of business purposes that do not require programming.  In order to fully understand this, it it necessary to see SharePoint as a WHOLE, not just as something you just learn as you go along.   SharePoint is not just technology that you need to operate, it is a powerful business platform whose effective use requires planning around business requirements. You can't develop requirements if you don't know what it can and can not do.

SharePoint can be used to create, automate, replace, or supplement many business functions, allowing companies to retire some legacy applications and create new ones that work in a much more integrated fashion with the rest of the company's common business applications. This class will teach you how to map business requirements into the SharePoint technology and help you plan, specify, manage, execute and design powerful business applications with SharePoint. This makes life much simpler for your IT team who can do the heavy technical lifiting, should the business requirements require a technical modification of SharePoints features.  We found that in most cases companies spend time and money and resources on programming when it is not necessary.

Agenda:

Day 1 – Understanding SharePoint Technology for a Business Architect

08:30 – 9:00     Room setup and preparation, Instructor discussion

09:00 – 10:00  Executive Overview – SharePoint as a Business Platform

In this section we introduce the key elements of SharePoint and describe their value to a business environment. You will instantly see the importance of SharePoint to your organization, and develop an instantaneous understanding of its role, its benefits, and its capabilties.

 
10:10 – 10:40   Installation, Migration, Maintenance, and Preservation

Discusses just the basics that an Architect should know, and from a business application point of view. If SharePoint is not configured properly at startup, some important business functions and capabilities do not work correctly, or may not be available. The function and performance of SharePoint depends heavily on just a handful of items that must receive special attention during set up, and which must be corrected in order to provide maximum business flexibility. This is particularly relevant to SharePoint's ability to properly manage the content on which most business applications rely.  Yes, there is more to life than just managing databases.

10:40 – 12:00   SharePoint Architecture: Comprehensive overview of features and capabilities

This section covers all of the "out of the box" capabilities that SharePoint provides, and covers them from an application (best use) and business benefit perspective.  We explain the features, limitations and capabilities of each SharePoint component and how it can best be used in a business environment.  Before you buy or add any other software products, start programming, or hire specialists, you need to understand exactly how far you can go with the features that you already have. 

SharePoint has an exhaustive list of capabilities to allow for the creation of a wide range of business applications, all of which are covered in this section. There are do's and don'ts when planning to leverage these capabilities.  You can find out at an opportune time now, or you can find out at an in-opportune time later.

12:00 – 1:00  Lunch (Provided)

01:00 – 2:00  SharePoint Architecture: Comprehensive overview of features and capabilities (Continued)

Kollabria has developed an conceptual architectural map of SharePoint that shows all of the features and functions of SharePoint in a logical diagram. This makes it much easier to communicate with others in the organization about SharePoint because it provides a common framework for understanding the features, where they lie and how they work. The model groups all SharePoint features and functions that belong together from a business application perspective, together. 

Section 1. The core SharePoint infrastructure. This section discusses what it is built on, and how that affects business processes and the creation of SharePoint applications. Items in the Core Infrastructure of particular importance is the Workflow foundation and how that relates to the ability to automate business processes. 

02:10 – 3:10  SharePoint Architecture: Comprehensive overview of features and capabilities (Continued)

Section 2: The SharePoint Service layer. SharePoint Services provide all of the underlying capabilities of SharePoint and determine the kinds of solutions and applications that can and can not be built using SharePoint. This section discusses what each service is, how it works, how it should be used, and what its business benefit is.

03:10 – 3:20  Break 

03:20 – 4:20  SharePoint Architecture: Comprehensive overview of features and capabilities (Continued)

Section 3. The SharePoint "Content Model".  How SharePoint manages content, libraries, taxonomies, security, content types, metadata columns, web parts etc. and how they can be used in a business application for accurate content retrieval and governance.

04:20 – 4:30  Break

04:30 – 5:00   SharePoint Version Differences and Important Licensing Considerations

Now that we have discussed them all, lets make sure that the features you are looking for and the one's you need are included in the version you currently have. Lets also look at other versions of SharePoint to make sure that you understand the differences in features and capabilities clearly.

Day 2 – Understanding SharePoint for Business

08:30 – 09:00   Room setup and preparation, Instructor Discussion

09:00 – 09:30   SharePoint Administration

Do you have the right SharePoint permissions, or just the expedient one?  Conversely did you assign the right permissions, or just the expedient ones? Are they properly configured and work optimally in a business application setting, or just turned on and turned loose?  

SharePoint has very powerful and flexible ways of assigning administration rights, and this sessions clearly explains what they are and how they work.  In a business setting this is the key to maximizing the business capabilities and configuration capabilities of SharePoint. 

09:30 – 12:00  The Six Main Business Functions of SharePoint

SharePoint is a powerful business platform for connecting people with information. In order to do that it comes with the underpinnings of six main application areas.

Enterprise Document Management

Records Management

Business Process Automation

Social Computing

Web Content Management

Business Intelligence

This section discusses SharePoint's out of the box capabilities for each and provides a business minded overview of those features and capabilities and how they relate to real world applications.  The section also discusses ways in which SharePoint can be configured, extended and programmed in order to create real world applications in each genre.

12:00 – 1:00  Lunch (provided)

01:00 – 5:00    Configuration Capabilities of SharePoint for Business Applications

This section introduces another key conceptual tool we provide, and that is the Kollabria Configuration Wheel. The configuration wheel is divided into four principal layers all of which need to be adressed in concert when planning a business solution.  The most common treatment in SharePoint deployment is to configure them independent from each other, and that is simply wrong.  This is what leads directly to security holes, slow search, messy file shares, poor content organization and poor user experiences.

Proper configuration of SharePoint (ie.no programming), coupled with a firm understanding of the SharePoint content model is the most important part of making SharePoint a successful part of your business.

Day 3 – Managing Your SharePoint Projects

08:30 – 09:00    Room setup and preparation, Instructor Discussion

09:00 – 12:00  Managing Your SharePoint Projects – Methodology

Successful business implementation of SharePoint requires a methodolgy to translate user needs and requirements into the SharePoint technology. In order to avoid fire extinguisher problem solving, all SharePoint application ideas and project should follow one consistant roadmap and approach.  This section uses an application example (finance) and provides worksheets/workbook concepts that can be used in order to evaluate solutions ideas, develop solution requirements, map requirements into SharePoint technology and implementing the solution.