Recently, I got a request from one of my friend who had never worked on SharePoint to provide him resources to quickly get on speed with SharePoint. It was really tough to tell about SharePoint technologies (WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007), which is such huge and expansive area, to someone who hasn’t seen it is really challenging. I tried to provide him some resources with context. Sharing it here also as there could be many others like my friend.

Getting to Know

• ONE STOP SHOP: where you’d find most of the resources is this portal: http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/

Again, the portal has so many resources that one can get lost easily. So here’s the order that you can start with

• High Level Overview: To get a very high level overview and know what kind of product you are heading to, read this article: Introduction to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

• End User Training:  To start with you should know how to “use” SharePoint. How does SharePoint looks like. For this, you should go through end user training. One of the great resource is End User Training from Microsoft:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointserver/HA102488011033.aspx

You can download the standalone edition and go through some of the trainings available here.

• Environment: To learn how to “use” or develop in SharePoint, it’s very important that you have working environment, where you can try hands-on! For this, you can either download pre installed VPC or download WSS or evaluation version of MOSS 2007 and install it on your server.
• Evaluation Guides: Once you get a little hang of SharePoint, get a quick look at all features available in WSS and MOSS from their respective evaluation guides: WSS, SharePoint

Developing

Once you have gone through the above resources, there are plenty of places where you can start learning about the development. Here are a few of resources that can get you up to speed quickly:

• SharePointDeveloper Portal: A lot of 100-200 level resources to get you started
• Ramp Up Portal: It has modules for many technologies. There are two modules on SharePoint – part 1 and part 2 

After going through above resources you are ready to venture anywhere in the world of SharePoint! It’s huge, you can start from anywhere and go anywhere! Any list of resources would not do justice to available resources on the net.

In any case, I’m providing a few Pages that provide links to other resources:

• http://blogs.msdn.com/kaevans/archive/2009/02/17/free-sharepoint-developer-resources.aspx
• http://www.intranetjournal.com/sharepoint/

Cheers!