The Road to SharePoint Mastery

So, you want to learn SharePoint? More than that, you want to master it? That's a significant challenge -- SharePoint is a complicated, multi-faceted product. The fact is few people are going to "master" SharePoint. However, it's possible to get close, if you're consistent, focused, and follow an appropriate road map. This article suggests a path that will lead you to ever increasing levels of technical and functional depth and understanding of the product.

Hit the Books

The first step is to hit the books. In the "old" days of pure WSS and MOSS, there were two must-have SharePoint books:

* Inside Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
* Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Administrator's Companion

These books provide both and "inside" and "outside" view of SharePoint. Inside WSS speaks mainly to developers. However, dedicated non-developers will learn enough process and high level development information by osmosis that it's well worth the effort. This may feel counterintuitive, but it's true.

The Administrator's Companion is like a survey book on U.S. history. A week after you read it, you'll have forgotten the date the constitutional convention began in Philadelphia, but you'll remember that it happened in the first place, roughly when and where. This book covers every MOSS function you can imagine. You won't likely use every SharePoint function and feature, especially in a waved released environment. However, this book will help you understand what's possible and the "possible" should shape how your organization rolls out the product. Later, maybe months or a year later, you'll recognize a business problem and be able match a SharePoint feature up against it.

SharePoint 2010 is new to the scene and it's just a little too early to clearly identify the must-have's for the new platform.

Take Advantage of the Community

The SharePoint community is one of premier technical communities on the planet. There are hundreds of bloggers, dozens of books in multiple languages, on-line forums, formal and informal gatherings every which way you turn. The SharePoint community produces a enormous amount of content targeting every conceivable business scenario. The community is a great resource, but the real value to the aspiring SharePoint master is community participation.

Blogging

Organizing your thoughts and putting them down on paper, so to speak, is an inherently good way to learn SharePoint. Bloggers need to overcome two common obstacles, however. First, blogs expose a side of you to the literally the entire planet. If you put up a poor blog entry, someone is going to call you on it and it can be ego-deflating. Second, it often feels like certain topics have already been blogged to death. Neither of these should stop you from blogging. In the first case, if you've made a mistake, so what? It's almost better, in fact, to make mistakes. We learn from our mistakes. It can certainly be ego-deflating (or worse, humiliating).

The good thing about the SharePoint community is that it's a very welcoming community. Other SharePoint bloggers generally don't jump down anyone's throat. The lone exception is stealing content. Don't do that - the community will band together against you and it can take a very long time indeed to recovery your reputation.

As for "it's been done before" -- again, so what? This is a learning experience for you. The process of writing it all down is the real value. If your goal is to learn, then you're not in this to push the boundaries of human knowledge. That said, even well-understood topics benefit from multiple blog discussions. Different people learn things differently. An old blog post written by an established blogger may prove to be less than helpful to a given reader while your new, fresh take on the subject may set off light bulbs for the same reader. You can rest assured that this will happen.