What I find interesting is why, when developing SharePoint strategies for companies, the companies themselves often view the training of staff as an unnecessary expense, an unnecessary evil, a hurdle that lengthens projects unnecessarily, or a logistic that can either be ignored or placed at the back of the queue.

The fact is that the foundation of successful SharePoint deployments is always training. Let me repeat that - always. One of the great beauties of SharePoint is that there are multiple ways of achieving the end goal, but a member of staff needs to be educated in what works best for them and why it will enable them as a knowledge worker.

As importantly is the consideration of what the member of staff is actually being trained in. Legacy training methods indicate that a person is trained in the specific application that they are going to use – today you are going to learn Word 2007. However SharePoint, as we know, is no ordinary application and must always be viewed in conjunction with its associated Office applications. Business users need to know how to use Outlook in conjunction with team site calendars and the benefits this brings. Business users want to know how to use Word to blog; they want to know how to create temporary workspaces from their Office applications. Therefore the answer lies in training users not to use applications, but instead to use a range of collaborative tools that fulfil their role requirements.

Another consideration is who is going to deliver training to end users. There are a handful of specialist SharePoint training companies and it is them who should be your first port of call. If not and you have the luxury of having a permanent training department or a contractor trainer who is a mix of business analyst and trainer then you may be on the right track.

One of the keys to successful training strategies is consistency, which means consistency of delivery, quality of trainer, consistency of trainer, consistency of attendance and consistency in the training programme lifecycle.

The idea that you can just throw out a quick start guide and tell users to get on with it is perilous and can as easily disenfranchise the end user community, allow them to simply feel dictated to by IT and provokes them to disengage. Every staff member out there has creativity, they are clever, they are important and if you hope to harness these talents you must engage with them in any aspect of new SharePoint service.

You should create a framework document to present a clear guide as to the training elements required to successfully deploy the new SharePoint services.

A Training Definition

The ability to use the new services and features of SharePoint is an ongoing process of education for each and every staff member and frequently it is necessary by law. An employer has the legal obligation to ensure that its employees have the ability to perform their job correctly and without suffering stress or performance inhibiting situations.

It is critical that SharePoint training is not viewed in isolation and that it is realised from the beginning that SharePoint works in direct conjunction with other tools such as Office, Outlook and Communicator and therefore a holistic view of training should be taken where possible if the company is to realise efficiency gains.

General Training Audience

There are pre-requisite types of common knowledge for using the SharePoint platform that all users of whichever audience, will need to know.

General Training Topics

• My Site creation & Use
• Profile page & user details updates
• Navigation
• Information Search
• People Search
• News and announcements
• Standard service features
• Alerts
• Links
• Document libraries
• SharePoint services & Outlook

Targeted Training – audiences

Training should then be broken down into audience groups as each group has different levels of training requirements to harness services that will assist them more specifically:

User based:

• Back Office and administrative
• Knowledge worker
• Management
• Executive

Support based:

• Technical support
• Content Manager
• Site collection administrator

By understanding that there is a requirement for focused training targeted at specific groups, the SharePoint platform will be understood and enhanced appropriately and you will see faster and happier engagement.

Targeted Example Topics by Audience

• Back Office and Administration
• Use of administrative areas and features
• Search for administrative information
• Use of quick links
• Use of profiles for knowledge and skill searching
• How to use the multiple ways of people searching

• Knowledge worker
• Using core information areas and services
• Using search effectively
• How to use the multiple ways of people searching
• Use of people profiles
• Use of quick links

• Executive and management
• People searching
• Organisational structures
• Using core information Services
• Knowledge and skill seeking
• Information searching
• Future roadmap for MI and BI
• Future roadmap for efficiency gains

Governance and Policy

To train any particular group of employees effectively, a company needs to be clear as to what is and isn’t allowed, that usage policies have been updated and that users know exactly where to find these policies. HR will also need to be kept in the frame as to new services that may affect them in managing staff activities in a collaborative arena as well as regional legislative restrictions or requirements.

The most important requirement to underpin all governance is that the new collaborative environment is not an ‘optional’ system.

Global Training

Due to the Global nature of many companies, some use policies may need to be refined at a country level though it should be remembered that some services will be available from global perspective such as a global discussion forum

Training services must be consistent throughout al countries and offered in both English and local languages to facilitate equal abilities and knowledge of the system. It is recommended that training forms a part of core services accessible to all and then cascaded down to regional and local levels.