The Road to SharePoint Mastery : Page 2

Don't let fear or "it's been done before" stand in the way of your personal learning success.

Online Forums

When people have problems, they turn to various online forums for help. There are several well-maintained and trafficked forums. Use them to further your learning objective and help out the community to boot. The Microsoft-hosted MSDN forums are a great starting point. They are very active (dozens of posts a day) across a variety of topics (admin, development, InfoPath, workflow, others). Use an RSS feed reader (like Google reader). Chip in with some easy answers but take time out to dig deeply into one or two of them a week (or more). The act of reproducing some crazy problem someone reported or prototyping a solution for them is a tremendous learning experience in and of itself. There's a good chance that you'll face that scenario yourself in the future and you'll be better prepared when it arises.

In-Person Events

There are several other great ways to pursue your learning objectives. These include:

• Conferences: Have a look at sharepointsaturday.org for a listing of these day-long world-wide events that take place several times a month. Participate in the sessions for a classic lecture-style lesson, but presenting is the true path to mastery. Think up a topic idea (or several) and submit to the event's organizers. SharePoint Saturdays are an easy entre into the "speaking circuit" so to speak. Once you have a few of those under your belt, you will probably find invites in your inbox to present elsewhere, including user groups. "

• Local User Groups: Odds are, there's a local SharePoint user group within easy commuting distance from your work or office. Join the group and attend the sessions. As with conferences, get yourself onto the speaker list and present.

Get Certified

It's probably safe to say that your resume shines just a tiny bit better when it shows you're Microsoft Certified. There is some debate as to the real value of these certifications from a resume-building point of view. However, there's no question that honestly pursuing certification is a valuable learning exercise.

There are so-called "study guides" available on the internet that list the actual test questions and actual test answers. With that in hand, it's just a matter of simple memorization to pass these tests. Aside from being morally suspect, this path is a complete waste of time if you want to become a SharePoint master.

At the time of writing this article, Microsoft has a handful of official SharePoint exams and they are all focused on SharePoint 2007 (WSS and MOSS). SP2010 beta exams are available to certain people and may be open to the public soon. Microsoft's guides for these exams are a road map in and of themselves. Take each bullet point, one by one, and study that topic. Not only will this process reward you with an honestly earned certification, you'll be a strong SharePoint developer/admin for it.

Conclusion

How long does it take? It takes a long time. Give yourself a year and you'll be a very strong SharePoint professional. It never ends, however. SharePoint 2010 has just burst onto the scene and for at least the next year, we SharePoint pro's will be living with one foot in MOSS world and the other in SP2010.

Apply yourself persistently over time with a clear roadmap that includes blogging, forums participation, presenting at conferences and user groups. You can't help but become a heavy hitter in the end.