Day One: Sharepoint Branding Bootcamp

By jen

I am in the middle of one of those extra spiffy hardcore learn it all in a week bootcamps for Sharepoint 2007. So far so good if I might say so myself. Usually at these courses a few things always happen on Day One:

1. You start the day with a million technical difficulties with both student and venue. I am happy to say with only a few projector issues which were resolved before class was scheduled to begin and a few issues with student machines that were resolved by the instructors over the course of the day with no noticeable delays to the agenda, everything moved right along.


2. There is always some obnoxious person who from the first five minutes of the course feels it is necessary to attempt to hijack the course to suit their own corporate needs, I would like it noted that in many cases they succeed. While we have a room full of folks with lots of different experience levels and serving different markets we do not have this person. There are a few students with a great deal of input but it is all on topic and doesn’t derail the pace of the class.


3. The food is always shit. Well, breakfast was what breakfast normally is at these events. Continental in nature consisting of breakfast breads, fruit, and various liquids. Good coffee is all I require before lunchtime so I was happy with the 2 cups I drank at the hotel and the two at the course. Lunch, usually a barely edible spread consisting of some sort of over cooked chicken breast, rice pilaf, salad, and greenbeans almondine and some sort of fruit salad from hell as a dessert or a inedible pie. Not so! We had salad greens with cucs, radishes, and tomatoes with Ranch Dressing of course and a really excellent slaw with raisins and carrot and cabbage. Hot food was a Chipotle Chicken Breast thingie with a decent sauce. Granted it is simply impossible to have chicken breast buffet style and it not be overcooked. Whether it is fear of undercooking chicken or just sitting in a chaffing dish for so long, whatever the reason, it is usually about 10 minutes past done. Still it was quite tasty. Greenbeans Almondine were present and really quite good and actually had some taste. Ranch beans or rather pinto beans with a decent thick chile powder based gravy. Beef brisket which I enjoyed and a choice of cornbread or biscuits. The biscuits were perfect and huge. Yay, baking chef! Dessert was a nice peach cobbler with fresh whipped cream topped by cinnamon. All in all I was delighted and things were looking up!


4. The powerpoint presentation that never ends… the staple of every course, orientation, training session, whatever it seems these days. I still hold that powerpoint is the root of all evil and the bane of many an IT professional. How many of you have had an exchange server brought to a grinding halt because some unwitting secretary decided to sent a 50 mb powerpoint presentation to her entire distribution list… of 50+ people? Granted that was years ago when I was in the network shop, but still… it was an imprinting experience for me.  We did have some slides, but they were short and sweet and made the best out of really dry material that has to be covered. Bravo!

Anyway…. Day One was a success. I am looking forward to the rest of the week and being reminded again of exactly how ginormous the task ahead of my shop is with this upgrade and migration.