I've been to a few local UG meetings that presented on certain technical aspects of SharePoint. At the start of each session, the presenters make sure to remark they're desperate for developers and are ready to hire qualified people on the spot. After each one I've gone searching the Web for any materials explaining what it can do and why the uninitiated might be interested in it, and basically drawn a blank. I think MS must be doing a poor job of promoting it.

Anyone know of a good SharePoint overview? Case studies?

My 2 cents...sorry if this is lengthy but I don't know a simple answer:

- You're right, there are places that are almost begging for SharePoint talent.

- there are some starter videos on MS' site:
http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/en-us/Pages/default.aspx

You can google "Sharepoint 2010" and "case studies" and find about a half-dozen right away. You'll notice that some of the case studies emphasize the social computing enhancements in 2010.

- There are more and more SharePoint user groups popping up There are also SharePoint Saturday events across the country (http://sharepointsaturday.org). I'm speaking at one in NYC in a few weeks. Once someone starts mingling with folks at these meetings, they find out different ways people are using SharePoint in their business environments.

- If there's a single good overview, I'm not aware of it. It is a platform that rivals .NET in terms of complexity. There are skill sets on the SharePoint Admin end, the SharePoint development end, the SharePoint/business intelligence end, and the power-user end. And that's just for starters.

- I learned SharePoint by working with the areas that integrated with SharePoint. I didn't touch SharePoint until mid-2007 when someone said they'd pay me to document the steps for publishing SSRS reports with SharePoint. Well, I had to create my own MOSS 2007 environment first....and then meant understanding MOSS farms, order of installation, database integration., etc. Then I had to learn the steps to configure MOSS to know about SSRS....and then how to configure SSRS to know about MOSS. Then I had to learn about site collections web parts, feature activation. etc. By the time it was all done, I had a nice long documented bullet point list of steps. The person I wrote it for said, "you gotta be fu__ing kidding me, I have to do ALL of this???"

Then the same thing came true when I needed to learn how to push Excel content up to SharePoint...had to learn about trusted connections, more about document libraries, refresh and authentication rules, etc. Then came a small PerformancePoint Server project where learned additional aspects of integration. Then the same thing came true when I started working with PowerPivot last year.....then I wrote a job that monitored SharePoint resources (that one was humbling).

And now I'm working with some examples that incorporate SharePoint and Silverlight.

So hopefully you see the trend - by working with major pieces that integrate with SharePoint, I learned pieces of SharePoint along the way.

There are some good books, aimed at different areas of SharePoint.

http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-SharePoint-2010-Solutions-Professionals/dp/1430228652/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top
http://www.amazon.com/Office-SharePoint-2010-rsquo-Guide/dp/1430227605/ref=sr_1_12?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1279436385&sr=1-12
http://www.amazon.com/Professional-SharePoint-2010-Development-Programmer/dp/0470529423/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1279436408&sr=1-3
http://www.amazon.com/Professional-SharePoint-2010-Administration-Klindt/dp/0470533331/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1279436408&sr=1-1

There are also some great MSDN blogs on the SharePoint object model - but it also takes some time to digest.


I'm about to say something rather controversial - sometimes I think those extra sessions of elbow grease, over a period of time, are about the only way to truly grok a software environment that is akin to "leg bone connected to the thigh bone" times a million. The videos on the MS site certainly have some value, but there is just no substitute for a serious self-immersion.

I'd almost be suspicious of any roadmap, because of the size of SharePoint. I've heard people say that Microsoft didn't anticipate just how much SharePoint would take off. It's a great product, but Christ, it's complex. It's like one gigantic tree trunk, and the only way I could see myself learning anything at all about it was to immerse myself in the different tools and applications that integrate with SharePoint. MS certainly relies (whether they acknowledge it or not) on the SharePoint community to promote the product's usage


So...far more than you probably asked for, but that's the only way I know to answer.