A: When it comes to training staff, there are many options. Your training need, whether it is for administrators, developers, or power users, can all be addressed by classroom training. Many established training companies have existing courses and use subject matter experts as contractors. This may be effective for end-user training and some power-user training that requires more hands-on time and knowledge procedural execution. If you have an internal training team, they may purchase pre-packaged training but they would then need the necessary time to gain mastery of the content.

For more advanced "real-world" situational administrator and developer training, these companies may fall short of expectations due to their dependence on lab-related course material. Therefore it may be better to find a company that specializes in more advanced areas of SharePoint. These companies will have subject matter experts that not only train but also carry out implementations. Typically this type of SharePoint subject matter expert is closely involved in course creation and therefore the day-to-day expectations of platform itself.

Another option if you happen to use consultants to deploy SharePoint is to make sure to allocate their time to provide training. They may not be classic trainers but they will have knowledge about your business use and needs. In this case, it is not so much training as it is a complete knowledge transfer at handoff. It goes without saying that the consultants will know your SharePoint solution intimately. Things to be gained by this approach are that your staff will learn about their solution from an execution point of view.

The drawback is that they may not gain foundational SharePoint concepts that will be needed once the occasion to extend the existing configuration presents itself.

Whatever choice (or combination of them) you decide upon, make sure that training needs and strategy are discussed and documented when your Governance plan is created.