Steve Smith, director (and SharePoint MVP) from Combined Knowledge in the UK talked about his new end user adoption solution and material. His new “end user adoption framework” brings together training and education material. He key quote: “the challenge with SharePoint is not about upskilling devs and admins … it’s about enabling end users to use SharePoint in their work.” (no disagreement from me on that one).

The solution has a lot of learning objects available, about different SharePoint tasks. When a company purchases the solution, you get the authoring tool (LearningGuide) to create new material.
– the content is created in different contexts.
– you can publish each learning object in different formats, eg, to a learning management system, or printed off as a PDF, or put onto a PDA
– can do “help on top” so the instructions stay on top … so you can follow along.
– there can be videos included in here … there is a video how-to on all topic references (over 400 videos)
– you can link into other CBT training … gives full at your desk learning.

Steve said they will be adding a certification mechanism in the future, to test people on what they’ve learnt.

The system will be available in a month or so, and locally in NZ through business partner KnowledgeCue.

This was a very relevant presentation for me, and very complementary to my work. I was just speaking with someone in Philadelphia two days ago about a huge need for this type of material …