This might seem odd to some of you. Why should a developer sit an admin course? The answer is simple. Because it is a great course!
I have had the pleasure of teaching a wide array of SharePoint courses over the last three years. Thanks to my field experience in SharePoint 2007 I could add the necessary value to the sales pitch courses 5060 and 5061 when they first came out. When 50047, the advanced IT admin course hit the market I was excited about teaching it. It included all the missing puzzle pieces and was truly a good course for SharePoint admins. the 50047 course was nearly on par with the Mindsharp/Combined Knowledge administrator course which I have had the chance to teach in the past as well.
But the question remains, why teach a SharePoint admin course to developers? Because you need to learn how to walk before you start to run. Many new SharePoint developers are new to the whole SharePoint world. They come from Windows, Java or Lotus development and are thrown into SharePoint development. If I'm lucky, they will have some ASP.NET experience. Most of them don't :-(. Before trying to learn how to develop a solution package, it might make sense to understand the built in features first. Before writing a timer job it might help to know what the jobs are, how they are run and why they are important. Before designing a feature receiver which makes a change to the environment it might help to understand the distributed architecture of SharePoint. Developing a custom login page for claims based authentication? Learn some IIS, NTLM and Kerberos basics first! 10174 is a great introduction to SharePoint as a platform. It covers all the building blocks that make up a SharePoint farm and more.
So before you try to break the world record in creating stable web parts in under 10s, make sure you have a thorough understanding of the SharePoint architecture first. Those five days in a room with someone who knows SharePoint inside out will save you months of trial and error, headaches and ruined relationships. You will know where to look for the log files. You will know how and why to create new web applications, site collections and sub sites. You will know how to configure your service applications, especially Search. And maybe you will get the one or other development specific tip as well, such as a impromptu demo of the new SPDiag tool which is a gem for admins and developers alike.
Read more SharePoint rants, thoughts and ideas on my blog at mctalex.blogspot.com
Wow Alex! Thanks for contributing this post. Makes perfect sense. Wish more developers would take the time to understand the beast before they attempt to embellish it.
it says: "This course is intended for IT Professionals who are experienced Windows Server 2003 or 2008 administrators".. does this mean if I have no knowledge about this, I couldn't understand anything out of this course?
I enjoyed the relaxed atmosphere of the class that the instructors created. Covered all topics related to sharepoint from installation, backups, customization and web part development. Their knowledge of the product being presented seemed to put all of the students at ease - we knew we were attending the best class to learn about the product. The three-pronged approach. Lecture-Demo-Lab. Everyone was extremely knowledgeable and friendly. Starting from the ground up to grasp a good foundation. Very stable and inclusive Virtual environment to work from. Awesome Job!!