Since it was first created, SharePoint has evolved from a basic product to its own product segment. SharePoint is used for company intranets as well as customer-facing websites; internal document collaboration and external partner networks; a basic management interface or an all-out project management system. Given its versatility and complexity, we've seen a host of new products come out to add onto or simplify SharePoint, as well as a huge boon in industry coverage and training on SharePoint.
Critical Path Training represents a training company devoted 100 percent to teaching IT pros, from beginner to expert, all about SharePoint. According to the company, they are the only SharePoint-only training company in the market.
SharePoint: Rags to Riches
Before delving into what Critical Path Training is doing to teach IT pros SharePoint, I wanted to get the company's opinion on how SharePoint has grown, what the needs of IT pros and related staff are, and where it's going in the future. I asked Andrew Connell, founding partner of Critical Path Training, to give me an overview of SharePoint.
Why are so many organizations implementing SharePoint right now?
"SharePoint is the fastest growing product in Microsoft's history. Organizations love SharePoint for many reasons, primarily because it does so many things for them. It is hard to compare it to competing products in the market because there is no one real competitor. There may be other options for ECM solutions, content management solutions, collaboration, social networking, search and business intelligence, but there is no single competitor. Companies like the fact they don't have to be in a position to buy many different products and then integrate them together. While SharePoint might not do everything that everyone wants, there is also a very robust and healthy ecosystem of partners that build off SharePoint."
Why is SharePoint training so critical for IT pros right now?
"SharePoint is a big product that does a lot of stuff. It also is usually the hub for a lot of collaboration within the organization and contains a considerable amount of the company's data & IP. Because of this, a SharePoint deployment needs to be properly architected to perform adequately, as well as have a reliable disaster recovery strategy. Just like other mission critical systems like Exchange and Active Directory, IT pros need to have a strong grasp of SharePoint specific issues and aspects to maintain a successful deployment."
What are the core questions about SharePoint that IT pros have?
"The two biggest questions we see IT pros asking are related to organizing and architecting a SharePoint farm, as well as how to best implement a disaster recovery and governance plan. SharePoint is a very big and complex project. Large deployments can have numerous servers that are dedicated to specific purposes such as serving web requests, indexing content for search, or performing complex calculations for business intelligence demands. The same is true for disaster recovery. With SharePoint being the hub of so much information and quickly becoming mission critical within organizations, IT pros need to know how to adequately backup and restore the system with minimal down time."
What is the future for SharePoint?
"We see SharePoint experiencing continued growth. Will it continue at the rate we've seen the past 3 years? Maybe, maybe not. But with all the work Microsoft has put into enhancing and improving the next release of SharePoint making it more enterprise ready, we expect to see more people upgrade from previous versions and also migrate to the platform. It will be exciting to see the customer reaction to the new product as news about features and plans start to be disclosed later this fall (the SharePoint Conference 2009 in October 2009 has been dubbed the '14' conference by Microsoft. '14' is the codename for the next version: SharePoint Server 2010)."
After the jump, we'll take a look at Critical Path Training as a company, and what differentiates them from other training and certification vendors.
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