Building an Offline Learning Kit for SharePoint 2010

SharePoint 2010 product and documentation teams and, the developer evangelists have done a great job of providing developers and IT Pros with learning material online. This content can be accessed mainly through the product homepages on MSDN and TechNet websites. Channel 9 also has lot of content.

Besides the articles, white papers and Visio diagrams, there is lot of good content in Video format. Accessing this content requires Internet connectivity and the high-quality videos require a lot of bandwidth. This problem gets aggravated if you a large developer team or if you travel a lot.

What’s the solution? Based on my experience, the best (and sometime only) way out is to download all this great content and have it available offline on your laptop, on file server or on your team’s SharePoint site. The flip side is the bandwidth required and time (and patience) it takes to download.

How to Track the Content?

First problem is keeping track of the content being published. I keep track by following blogs and links given below:

• Newly published content for SharePoint Server 2010 on TechNet. RSS feed
• Recently Published Content on SharePoint Developer Center. RSS Feed
• GetThePoint blog
• Microsoft SharePoint Developer Documentation Team blog
• To the SharePoint blog
• Channel 9 – SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint tags
• Microsoft Download Center

Let me know if you know of a better URL to keep track of all the content being published.

Downloading the Content

In this section, I have listed the various sources I found for downloading content. At some places, multiple video formats are available.

White Papers and Guides:

• SharePoint 2010 Resources for IT Professionals
• SharePoint 2010 Resources for Developers 
• Downloadable content for SharePoint Server 2010
• Microsoft Download Center

Presentations:

• SharePoint Server 2010: Advanced Developer Training Presentations - Collection of in-depth training presentations for SharePoint Server developers
• SharePoint Server 2010 Advanced IT Pro Training presentations - Collection of in-depth training presentations for SharePoint Server IT pros

Online Trainings:

MSDN - Learn SharePoint Development

• Get Started Developing on SharePoint 2010
• SharePoint Advanced Developer Training
• SharePoint Enterprise Search Developer Training

TechNet - Learn SharePoint Server 2010

• Get started with Microsoft SharePoint 2010
• Advanced training for SharePoint 2010
• SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Search IT professional training
• SharePoint for Internet Sites Implementers' Course
• SharePoint Enterprise Content Management Implementers' Course
• SharePoint Server 2010 Business Composites Training
• SharePoint Server 2010 Business Intelligence Insights Training

Channel 9 Videos:

• SharePoint Channel
• SharePoint 2010 Channel
• Tech·Ed North America 2011 

Offline Training Kits:

• SharePoint 2010 Developer Training Course
• SharePoint and Silverlight Training Course
• Office 2010 Developer Training Course
• SharePoint 2010 and Windows Azure Training Course
• SharePoint 2010 and Windows Phone 7 Training Course
• Silverlight 4 Training Course

More offline training kits are available here.

How do I – Videos

• How Do I Videos for Office Developers
• SharePoint Server 2010 Help and How-to Videos

Other Kits

• Developing Applications for SharePoint 2010
• SharePoint 2010 Reference: Software Development Kit
• Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Administration Toolkit v2.0

Office 365 content

• Office 365 Jump Start
•  Office 365 Developer Training Course
• Microsoft Office 365: Connect and Collaborate Virtually Anywhere, Anytime

Once you are through with all the downloads you would have exceeded 40Gb if you selected high quality video option (wherever available) !!