SharePoint Business Professional™ Training & Certification Program

This is a training class about SharePoint 2010 - specifically designed to create the role of a business solution architect to guide, manage, and organize the use of SharePoint for a variety of business applications. An optional certification test allows you to obtain certification credentials.*

The program concentrates on the skills and knowledge necessary to reign in "run away" file shares, to rectify inconsistent management of critical company information, to resolve applications that don't do what users need them to do, and to drive an orderly adoption of SharePoint for enterprise application deployment.

"SharePoint 2010 is a general purpose platform for connecting people with information"
- Steve Ballmer, CEO Microsoft at the SharePoint 2010 launch

SharePoint is a unique product. It is, without question, in a category of one. It is a powerful and complex general purpose platform with the capability of replacing or enhancing numerous existing line of business applications and permitting collaboration across multiple external data sources for the purpose of improving business productivity. As such, it has a range of application never before seen in business. We at Kollabria have called it a Business Operating System. Just like a traditional operating system is a platform that supports the operation of a computer as an integrated system of hardware, software, and applications, a Business Operating System is a platform that supports the Enterprise across functional business lines and controls the ability to integrate, distribute, and manage the information used by applications.

SharePoint offers a plethora of ways to manage and distribute content of any kind. It is capable of automating business processes around the globe, publishing content to websites, and securely interacting with data coming from legacy sources in ways previously unimaginable. While it can do all these things, it can also quite easily allow you to lose all control over that content, create security nightmares and build productivity applications that workers simply refuse to use.

Critical success factors we have researched over the course of the past 5 years, show that SharePoint is capable of doing those wonderful things only if you can harness its features and capabilities from a business point of view. Then you can save money that you might otherwise spend on other applications, then you can dramatically improve worker and business productivity, and then you will have harnessed the elusive power that lets your business do more with less. Others have done just that - the goal of this course is to make it easier for you to do the same.

In a nutshell, Microsoft has provided the technology and the tools to build powerful and exciting cost saving web based business applications with SharePoint, but does not provide a manual for business on how to utilize them in a meaningful business context.

The Missing Business Manual for SharePoint, and the Missing Business Skill

SharePoint may be one of the most powerful tools in your solution arsenal, but is difficult to properly deploy. Just like you wouldn't let carpenters, plumbers and electricians simply start building a house without the planning and guidance of an architect, why would you allow users, or developers to nail together the technology of SharePoint without the same consideration? The architect is a missing but necessary role in the SharePoint world whose job is to define what should be built, and how. An architect (the SharePoint Business Professional™) understands all of the out of the box features of SharePoint and how they can be used to configure a wide range of business applications, not just this week's need for a web part.

• A SharePoint Business Professional™ can efficiently translate the requirements of business users into the features and capabilities of SharePoint, saving your development and IT staff an enormous amount of headaches trying to build solutions where requirements are poorly conceived, or preventing a waste of time and effort when the desired solution is not possible to build with SharePoint.
• A SharePoint Business Professional™ can determine the need for additional products to extend the SharePoint environment in the right way, and also determine whether or not those extensions are indeed necessary, will meet user solution needs, or are the right choice.
• A SharePoint Business Professional™ understands ALL of the configuration capabilities and limitations of SharePoint and how they can be used to create, configure, manage and deploy a wide range of business applications.

The "documentation" for SharePoint (in the form of Microsoft TechNet and MSDN) stretches in excess of 10,000 pages. It is randomly organized by technology or feature and provides little in terms of planning or architecting support. It tells you what something is, but provides little in terms of explaining how it relates to to a solution. From a sheer volume of information perspective, it is clear that few people have read it, or given the level of organization, can even make sense out of what they have read. We have. The SharePoint Business Professional™ training program breaks all of that information down and organizes it in a series of meaningful conceptual models that are highly useful, consistent, and easy to share with others. In short, after the class, the training manual becomes the missing business manual for SharePoint 2010. It is designed to be repeatedly utilized for team planning and internal project management purposes.

The SharePoint Business Professional™ Training & Education Curriculum

A SharePoint Business Professional™ understands SharePoint features and functionality, the capabilities and limitations of the underlying technologies, applications, services, and interfaces in a business context, and can determine the performance capabilities and requirements necessary to determine the cost effective suitability for deploying a SharePoint based business application.

Course Duration: 2.5 - 3.0 days depending on Q & A

Time: 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM, (9:00 AM - 1:00 PM last day)

Price: $1,995 (Discounts are available for multiple attendee's and private on-site classes)

Materials: 300 Page Training Manual (provided)

Certification test fee $100 (optional on-line test)*

Intended Audience:

Any business professional involved with SharePoint solution definition, application definition, application design or consulting. Integrator, VAR, Business Analyst, Application Designer, IT Director and above who wants a detailed understanding of SharePoint features and capabilities in order to architect and deploy SharePoint solutions the right way.

Curriculum Outline:

DAY ONE: Understanding SharePoint Technology for a Business Architect

Chapter 1 – SharePoint as a Platform

SharePoint is a very powerful tool to assist in the management of information across and entire organization. It can hold a wide variety of content in one general repository allowing users to access the right information at the right time – eliminating the information silos created by proprietary content management systems. SharePoint 2010 even makes surfacing information from external sources possible.

This chapter sets the stage for understanding SharePoint as a platform, NOT an application. An application is targeted towards a specific task – like a spreadsheet is targeted at processing numeric data. SharePoint is not targeted towards any one task. That would explain why SharePoint’s “manual” (TechNet and MSDN) has over 10,000 pages dedicated to the care and feeding of SharePoint. Understanding SharePoint in the way described in this section forms the critical underpinning for maximizing its solution benefit to the organization, and goes a long way towards driving adoption.

Chapter 2 – Installation, Migration, Maintenance, and Preservation (Just the Basics that an Architect Should Know)

SharePoint is only as capable as it is configured to be. Proper understanding of the configuration of the SharePoint farm is essential in the planning process in order to design productive applications that benefit the organization. This section covers the basics of SharePoint’s farm architecture and how the architecture ties in to the management of the organization’s content. Relax! An SBP™ does not need to understand how to actually build a server, but rather know how to leverage the organization’s SharePoint environment to make beneficial applications for end users.

Chapter 3 – SharePoint Architecture

Being a general purpose platform means that SharePoint has a vast array of tools and features that can be used to manage information. This section teaches the technical and business benefit of all the tools available in SharePoint and places them into a logical framework so it is easy to understand how each feature interacts with each other and how these interactions impact the user experience. The Kollabria Architectural model for SharePoint also allows you to articulate the capabilities and business benefits of each of SharePoints features. Learning this framework allows an SBP™ to define solutions and clearly explain to users and management how the application is going to work.

Chapter 4 – Version Differences and Licensing

SharePoint has evolved over the years from a simple portal tool to a powerful platform. How SharePoint is distributed and licensed has also evolved. This section teaches the improvements in SharePoint 2010 from MOSS 2007, and clearly outlines the feature and capability differences between the “free” and premium editions including what is in each edition, and where the line is drawn, and how those lines impact the business capabilities of SharePoint.

DAY TWO: Understanding SharePoint for Business 

Chapter 5 – SharePoint Administration

“With great power comes great responsibility…” This line from the original Spiderman movie still rings true for SharePoint. SharePoint has a variety of powerful administrative roles each with a unique level of access and capability that must be clearly understood for a proper business solution environment. In many cases administrative roles are only properly configured for technical purposes, not for business applications.  In this session we teach the administration options SharePoint offers, and provide best practices for implementing and managing them.

Properly leveraging the many types of administrators in SharePoint makes it possible to give individuals just the right amount of administrative capability. That way an IT administrator can manage SharePoint from a technical aspect without the concern that a site administrator will negatively impact the farm, or that a web developer need not worry that a list manager can alter the site, etc.

Chapter 6 – The Six Main Business Functions of SharePoint

SharePoint is a platform. It has the capabilities to do many things right out of the box. However, nearly everything an organization expects SharePoint to do does not happen automatically. It all requires proper specification, and configuration in order to work. Why? Because a platform is the base in which the solution is built upon.

This section teaches the common business functions organizations use SharePoint to address, how SharePoint really works to perform these functions, what’s missing, and what can be done to extend SharePoint in order to meet business needs. It is not that SharePoint cannot do common business functions; it just does them in a different way. Here’s how…

Chapter 7 – Configuration Capabilities of SharePoint for Business Applications

SharePoint is often mistakenly viewed as a developers’ paradise. However, often overlooked is the extent to which SharePoint can be configured to meet users’ needs – without the need for any programming. This platform has many utilities and features that can be configured long before a developer needs to apply his or her craft. This section teaches the purpose and configuration best practices for each of SharePoint's many configuration capabilities.

An SBP™ learns what can be configured and how to do it, where configuration reaches its limits, and what to do next. 

DAY THREE: Managing Your SharePoint Projects

Chapter 8 – Managing Your SharePoint Projects — Methodology

SharePoint is capable of doing so many different things for an organization. The question is where to start. Allowing SharePoint to run loose in an organization can lead to a disaster. However, careful planning to determine the right SharePoint projects and how to implement them can make SharePoint a key part of the organizational infrastructure – as it was intended to be.

This section teaches the Kollabria SharePoint Project Methodology, a powerful, clear and organized approach to implementing SharePoint projects – from selecting which projects SharePoint is suited for, to the right way to go about the planning and execution of the SharePoint solution.

Class Dates and Locations 2012 (Q1)

As you read this, Kollabria is busy helping these and other leading companies get the most out of their SharePoint investment by creating SharePoint Business Professionals that can plan and execute effective business solutions on SharePoint ...

* Certification test coming mid 2011

Suggest other cities and timeframe's here