Ask a Trainer: Free resources to help you learn SharePoint

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FAST university has free webcasts on Enterprise Search and other SharePoint topics

At the MCT Summit in October, I had a chance to chat with Larry Kaye, a Microsoft Certified Trainer. Larry works with FAST University. I hadn’t heard of that organization before, so I asked Larry to fill me in on what they do. I’ll summarize the key offerings here, but if you don’t feel like reading, just watch my interview with Larry below (apologies for the camera shake, I am prone to that, I think I should get a tripod)

FAST University offers training and resources on SharePoint for administrators and developers. Although they cover other topics as well, they offer a lot of training on search features. They have classroom training, and just in case there are no classroom dates or locations convenient for you, they also offer virtual and e-learning courses.

If you register at their website, you can see a full list of the resources, and access a number of free webcasts! Including the following which I thought might be of interest to SharePoint developers:

  • Architecture of Search in SharePoint 2010 – learn the architecture of search in Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint.
  • Business Connectivity Services – Creating a .NET Connectivity Assembly in Visual Studio – learn how to connect SharePoint to external data sources such as SQL Server databases, SAP applications and Web services.
  • FAST Search for SharePoint 2010 – Property Extraction – Learn about the property extraction feature that identifies information such as person names, company names, and geographic names and locations in documents. These properties help you find the “who”, “what”,”when”, and “where” of each document.
  • Fast Search Server for Internet Sites (FSIS) with Content Transformation Services (CTS) – Learn about Content Transformation Services, how to build flows and sub-flows and tips and techniques for building flows in Visual Studio.
  • Search Reporting and Analytics with FAST Search Server – An introduction to Search Reporting and the Search administration tools.

Here’s Larry talking about FAST University and their courses.