End of last year my team was given a small amount of budget to fund classroom based SharePoint 2010 Developer Training to our “managed ISVs” – a list of less than 100 UK companies that the team works closely with to help explore and adopt new technology from Microsoft.

But… I am a “little different” to the rest of my team this year. My remit is to help the other X thousand ISVs in the UK that fall outside of “managed”. I spotted an opportunity to take that budget and do something that had the potential to help all UK ISV who wanted to drill into SharePoint 2010.

Last week we delivered the first pilot taking the classroom based content and delivering it as three days of Live Meetings. You might want to check out the notes we made to understand what was covered.

Overall it was a success… which is not to say it couldn’t be improved. The attendees gave some great suggestions which we will incorporate into the next delivering in March plus I jotted down some of my own. I have left out “biscuits during the breaks” out as I haven’t got a solution just yet – but I have some ideas :-)

Improvements:

• More pointers to real world usage
• More detailed agenda/pre-requisites – to allow more experienced people to pick and choose
• Poll after each section to share a pulse of how interesting people found it, likelihood to use it etc
• More on “intro to sharepoint” at the beginning – “why?” etc.
• Minimise “dead space” moments when presenter is in “think/wait” mode
• The Q&A moderator should resist answering tech questions – as the questions in the queue act as good feedback to the presenter.
• Continue to use SurveyMonkey.com registration + feedback – worked out really well.
• Be more prescriptive on the “homework” for the next morning.

I also wanted to thank QA Training for being flexible enough to help make this happen and to the trainer Matt Bishop who did his first ever delivering using Live Meeting. Well done Matt!

Better than Classroom?

Well … maybe not, but this question lead to an interesting response. 77% were neutral or preferred the online experience.

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