I was in the middle of presenting a four hour SharePoint workshop this week when, during the final hour, the OS on my laptop decided it had had enough and came to an unceremonious halt. (If you’ve been there, you know why the flowery language… it represents a lot of hand waving, nothing up my sleeve, here’s my next magic trick kind of stuff while the participants are grinning thinking ‘I wonder what he is going to do next?”)

 I was able to get out alive, but I had to deliver again to another group in four hours… all live, hand-ons on, participatory kind of material. My savior came in the form of SharePoint 2007.

Because all of the presentation material was stored within a Presentation Archive document library on SharePoint, the sandbox subsites created for all participants were within SharePoint and because SharePoint is web based, I was able to switch over to another machine, verify all was working correctly, and then relax a little before the next workshop.

We’ve all heard the expression “Eat your own dogfood.” In this case, if I had been running everything locally instead of within SharePoint, I would have had a very disappointed group of participants, not even talking about the corporation that had hired me to present. As it turned out, because web based SharePoint is transparent to the End User through the web interface, it didn’t matter what machine I was presenting from as long as it had access to the training portal.

Moral of the story? I’m using SharePoint to deliver SharePoint training and I’m VERY happy I am.

Similiar war stories would be appreciated. Post yours in the comment section.

Mark