Wednesday, September 28, 2011

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:
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:

Presentations:

Online Trainings:

MSDN - Learn SharePoint Development
TechNet - Learn SharePoint Server 2010

Channel 9 Videos:

Offline Training Kits:

More offline training kits are available here.

How do I – Videos

Other Kits

Office 365 content


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