Saturday, August 29, 2009

Turn your intranet into a training “Productivity Hub” – A SharePoint site collection prefilled with Microsoft Office and SharePoint training materials (optional reg-ware)

Chris Bortlik's Blog - Free Office, SharePoint and Windows training resources for your Intranet

“We have recently released the Productivity Hub as a free download. A number of my customers have been beta testing this Hub over the past few months and it has received great feedback and helped to accelerate the deployment, adoption and training for Office and SharePoint 2007.

The Hub is a SharePoint Server 2007 site collection that serves as a learning community and is fully customizable. It provides a central place for your training efforts, and includes training content from Microsoft’s core products. Microsoft also provides ongoing and updated content packs.

The Hub uses SharePoint Server’s social networking capabilities, such as blogs and discussion groups. In addition, it offers the Coach program, a change management feature to help you train end users to self-help, reducing the burden on your training and IT staff. The Coach program impacts productivity in a collaborative and positive way.

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Microsoft Downloads - Productivity Hub

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Version: 08-2009
Date Published: 8/28/2009
Language: English
Download Size: 35 KB - 465.4 MB*
*Download size depends on selected download components.

 

What the Productivity Hub is:

  • Format: Pre-loaded SharePoint site collection, optimized for Web 2.0 functionality and easily deployed within SharePoint Server 2007 environment.
  • Content: Convenient end user productivity training in a variety of formats (documents, videos, podcasts, etc.). Receive free quarterly updates of content that you will learn about through the Productivity blog.
  • Blog: The Productivity blog offers tips and tricks for end user productivity. Use it as is, or your training staff can use the posts as their own to help them get started in running an internal blog.
  • Train the trainer: Includes IT/Manager section to aid with deployment of the site collection, and guidance to develop the Coach program.
  • Products: Office 2007 System applications including SharePoint Server 2007. Windows 7 and others will be added in the future.


You can also download additional content packages that expand the training materials you can make available through the Hub.

Add-on Content Package
This content package contains more than 200 additional training materials that you can add to the Microsoft Productivity Hub. The package includes materials for five new products -- Live Meeting, OneNote, Project, Publisher, and Visio -- as well as additional content for Access, Communicator, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, SharePoint, and Word. Install the Hub before using this content package.

Files in This Download

The links in this section correspond to separate files available in this download. Download the files most appropriate for you.
File Name: File Size  

Microsoft Productivity Hub Installation Guide.docx

35 KB

ProductivityHub.EXE

383.1 MB

ProductivityHub_August09_Content.EXE

82.2 MB

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Free training materials, help in training your users, training management, etc. Not a bad deal at all… :p

I do wish there was a sample site, example screenshots, etc, so I could see it without having to actually install it (since I don’t have a dev SharePoint Server nor the juju to try it on our stage/prod servers, so would have to get “others” involved, submit tickets, etc, etc, etc… sigh).

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