So far I’ve found the ‘Stump the Panel’ forum most helpful. I’ve also found a site you didn’t mention very useful: http://www.sharepointoverflow.com/

Thank you for putting this article together!

If you will write an article on what you are trying to accomplish, what your goals are and how other people in the community can help you, we’ll jumpstart your exposure.

This should be fun. — Mark

Kat – We have a winner, folks! Step right up and claim your prize… one year of purgatory, trying to lead a herd of cats and get consensus.

I’ll help in anyway you need: create a management area, setup a wiki, act as provider of resources. Think of it as your project, with me as your rolodex and sponsor, with Christian and Richard as your conscience..

How would you like to start? — Mark

I’m so glad to see there is more interest in this type of certification (official or not). I have talked about this at length within my organization, and I mentioned it to Mark Miller at SPBPC in DC in August (he indicated that he knew of interest from users and from Microsoft, but that someone really needed to just “own” the project and get it going). Richard, you heard me chatting w/ “Calgary Jay” about it at the conference and offered some of those concerns you mentioned here. I certainly understand the challenges and the fact that Microsoft may not see such a certification as a money maker for them, but I feel strongly that SOME type of certification for “the rest of us” would be highly beneficial. End users are the key to success when it comes to SharePoint. Since it’s the Intranet Managers or super power users at companies that need to actually BUILD the sites out in order to get traction from users, it would be wonderful to have a way to test and certify what we’ve learned and that we possess the knowledge and skills required for advanced management of SharePoint.

Think about it- we don’t graduate from college without passing some exams and writing some papers. We can’t easily get a job that requires a college degree if we can only say, “yeah, I sat through four years of college classes.” We need to show the diploma that you can only get when you have the grades that were generated from our attendance plus papers plus exams. We needed to PROVE our knowledge, not just show up to class. I strongly feel that permissions for Design/Full Control/ Site Collection Ownership should not be handed out in good faith. We ideally would test and prove that people KNOW how to carefully use those powerful permissions.

I am desperately seeking a certification for my site admins/power users so I can have a way to determine if they’ve truly learned what they’ve been taught. While I personally would love an “official” certification “proving” my own expertise w/ OOB SharePoint, I care far more right now about having a solid way to test my site admins. I started writing up questions for my own test, but I haven’t had the time/resources to build a nice, interactive, answer-checking exam.

Mindsharp is the only group I know of that has put a lot of money into developing a training and testing combo in their UserVersity. While I am very intrigued by what they’ve done (and we may very well use them for our site admin certifications), I would love something free built by the community OR an exam we would pay for that would be recognized by Microsoft.

FYI: Since I truly have a growing need for certifications at work, I am currently planning for the following:

- a group of “intranet specialists” who are our true power users, willing and able to spend 5-10% of their time learning, practicing, and growing their site owner knowledge and sharing their expertise out to teams who need support. These folks will form a small group, and they will be required to complete the “power user” and “site owner” certifications from Mindsharp’s UserVersity (for lack of a better option).

- a group of “site admin exceptions.” They have the skills (or should) but don’t have the time to participate in an ongoing group of intranet specialists and loan out their services to other teams. These people will need to pass a basic certification test- a homemade list of “tasks” they need to complete on a blank test site (demonstrating their ability to create lists/views/design pages, and manage permissions and create alerts). Once I check their work and verify they seem competent to manage their own team sites, they can have “full control” permissions for their designated sites.

Until now, it’s been all about training and no way to “certify,” which has sadly left me with a bunch of well-intentioned folks who *want* to learn…but the majority don’t practice, and wind up coming back to me again and again with the same questions and requiring ongoing hand-holding for the same site admin tasks. I know who I think is having trouble and probably shouldn’t be ceritified, but it’s much easier to have a standard system and be able to tell management, “John Smith doesn’t have full control on your site because he hasn’t passed our certification exam. If he needs to be your site admin, please make sure he has the necessary time to learn and take the test, and then we will be happy to grant him the permissions he needs.” I dream of being able to say that… :)

ANYWAY- I would be *gulp* happy to lead this effort and work with you fine folks in the community to build out a certification (set) of tests that could be used by anyone out there.

I wonder if a community wiki would be a good way to get the ball rolling and start brainstorming what the questions should be, what tracks would be logical, what answers would be acceptable, etc. Thoughts? Richard- is there a way to do this w/in nothingbutsharepoint.com?

Kat :)

I was hoping to see this engaged in full swing after NothingButSharePoint had been released but it’s certainly something that many people are doing right now. Training companies that specialize in SharePoint already have their own programs for end user/super user scenarios and I know many consultant organizations, or internal organizations have their own super user achievement/certification programs as well.

There are a couple challenges. The biggest one in my opinion follows:

Since many of the certification programs that exist for SharePoint super users are created for specific companies in specific verticals (manufacturing, government/federal etc) – who also have a specific level of SharePoint Maturity – the programs, or tests, or types of certification really do vary by quite a bit and often are heavily specialized.

For one organization document management questions and a document management feature driven test might be far more relevant than one that gets into say effectively utilizing SharePoint Designer. Obviously from a vertical perspective the influences change as well. Heavily regulated industries will have questions around what is acceptable/appropriate usage in SharePoint as well as the technical driven ones.

My recommendations of what we can all do RIGHT NOW (regardless of what MS and others do):
1. Together with many other people/partners we all need to come up with a complete listing of what things we could test super users or end users on. This identification and definition phase is key for us to be able to build out effective tests in the community. Even if it never gets stamped by Microsoft if it makes sense and is valuable then anyone can leverage it internally to help optimize SharePoint usage. (Or just guide training.)
2. Build out and share (freely) tests, questions, and exercises for each identified area or topic of interest for end users/super users.
(Keep in mind that by sharing the ‘answers’ at this point you run into significant risks of ‘cheating’ for the certification. So it depends on what your real goal with the certification was. In my opinion the advantage is leveraging it internally at an enterprise, but perhaps as the industry matures it’s also important to denote end users/site administration specialists. For that you will want to look at my fourth recommendation.)
3. Implement across many organizations these tests, questions, and exercises and share the results over time. Not just the initial poll but follow ups in 3 or 6 months to see if the tests and ‘certification’ should still be valid or requires a change/update.
4. Engage Microsoft and other key training partners to make it a true certified exam.
At this point we have the data, and experience (not to mention exposure) to directly influence certification providers in this space. The reality is that this knowledge (how end users should/do use SharePoint) is only available through current partners, and community members. At this point it’s my recommendation that the questions get revamped and you have a very small group (who knows the answers etc) create the ‘final’ series of exams or single exam for this. Now the chances of ‘cheating’ are much lower and it can be seen as a reliable certification mechanism in the industry.

Just a couple quick thoughts but perhaps this will help spin off a greater discussion. Anyone willing to take up the torch and lead facilitating this? I know I am more than willing to contribute and last time I posted a tweet around this got quite a bit of feedback from other people interested.

1. I created a LinkedIn Group for SharePoint Speakers (thanks for your contributions). Anyone who has spoken or is scheduled to speak publicly on SharePoint (at a SharePoint Users Group, SharePoint Saturday, or any of the larger conferences; or as a trainer, instructor, teacher of SharePoint) is welcome to join the conversation. http://linkd.in/azuHHO

2. I’ve begun the preliminary step of starting a users group within my company. I’m “The SharePoint Guy” here, so leading such a group will (a) let me know how the company IS using it; (b) show me how they WANT to use it; and (c) generate some projects to move its adoption forward. I’m looking forward to it. I created a couple of flyers, created a subsite on our portal, and will be posting an announcement in the near future. Thanks for the great idea!