SharePoint MOC 8036a

Last week I was teaching the MOC 8036a - Designing IT platform collaborative applications with SharePoint 2003, this course is a replacement for MOC 2012. It is a 2-day course which explains all the basics of SharePoint, stuff like deployment, features, security and architecture. It is a nice overview if you are not familiar with SharePoint and want to get up and running in 2 days. Some observations of mine (I won't be so harsh in my critique as Patrick - definitely take a look at the last line of his posting - but I definitely see his point) :

I think that the SharePoint MOCs contain a little too much marketing material, if customers are following this course, they probably already know about the merits of SharePoint so don't rub it in.

There are a lot of annoying little errata: e.g. it still talks about the limits of MSDE, while WSS actually ships with a modified version of MSDE - WMSDE which has the limitations removed

The course should at least provide a chapter about SharePoint customization, it doesn't even talk about the difference between site templates and site definitions. If you want to learn more about site definitions and site templates read the whitepaper Customizing SharePoint Sites and Portals Part II

Some things are repeated over and over again in the slides, ... and the course is definitely missing a clear structure.

Maybe these shortcomings are only so conspicious when you have already some experience with SharePoint, but anyway this is not an excuse, these MOCS definitely need improvement. Of course,if your trainer is good, it makes a world of difference ;-) ...

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