Tuesday, July 30, 2013

New to SharePoint?

Want to learn about SharePoint, application development and solutions using this amazing platform?

I always run into people in the IT business who heard about SharePoint but want to know what it’s all about.

I used to answer in emails or private messages but decided it might be a good idea to share some good links to good online learning materials for the autodidacts among us.

Enjoy, and feel free to share and add more in comments!

(Links to other non related sites in comments will not be approved. Links to commercial sites won’t be approved either.)

My favorite, Microsoft’s Channel 9:

http://channel9.msdn.com/Tags/sharepoint

Super quick start on your own development environment, use cloudshare. You get 30 days free trial, and they have lots of templates to start from (incl. SharePoint 2007, 2010 and 2013)

http://www.cloudshare.com

And, if you have the hardware and just want a SharePoint virtual machine image to play with – you can download and install one from here, but you will have to install and configure your dev environment yourself:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/hh973397.aspx

* This product key is good for 180 days, I suggest you take a snapshot of the virtual machine before you activate it to make sure you can restart your trial period. Obviously, this is great for dev but can’t be used for production as you need to revert and reactivate every 180 days.

There used to be a demo Hyper-V machine preinstalled and available from Microsoft.com, but it appears they have removed the link. I will post as soon as I find it.

Of course, you can also enjoy SharePoint online as a part of Office 365. This will allow you to use SharePoint, perhaps deploy some apps on it – but won’t allow you to develop on it (no full trust solutions and not even apps).

There is a developer version of this which allows you to use “Napa” in order to build SharePoint 2013 apps, and you can open your trial account here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/fp179924.aspx

Depending on your relationship with Microsoft you can get anywhere from 30 days trial up to 1 year of free subscription. All information is at the abovementioned link.

I will post more info as I get it, please feel free to add stuff in the comments.

 

Good luck!