Many companies are trying to tackle more work in less time. Getting people up to speed quickly and getting tasks completed sooner is more important than ever.

In this post, we’d like to ask you to tell us which SharePoint Server content and features might help you or your company save time, and we’ll share some ideas that we’ve heard from other readers.

Tell us what you think about content. Are video, training, and examples helpful? What other types of content could help your company make the most of SharePoint Server? Is there any content you’d like to see added or improved?

We’d also like you to tell us about features in the product. Which features are the most useful to you? Which features could be improved? Are there features that give you a headache or take too many steps?

Feel free to share your ideas via the Comments section in this post, and we’ll share the feedback with the product team and use your input to plan future content.

Meanwhile, here are links to articles that might be helpful, based on comments we’ve received from other customers. On our SharePoint Server Help site on Office Online, for example, we ask customers to comment on articles, and we’ve searched the feedback for comments about saving time and making tasks more efficient.

·        Get SharePoint Training on Your Desktop - Some customers say this content helps them understand the bigger picture of how SharePoint Server features work together, while enabling them to drill into specific areas of interest. You can download the standalone edition, or deploy the training on your SharePoint Server. You can also view a similar version, Roadmap to using SharePoint Server 2007, directly on the Web.

·        Demo: Tour a team site - This video shows how a team might use a team site to share content and get work done. Customers tell us it helps to see the features in action.

·        SharePoint document libraries I: Introduction to sharing files - Customers say this course has helped them understand the basics of using SharePoint libraries. If you’d like to take more courses, see the SharePoint Server 2007 training courses roadmap.

·        Introduction to managing SharePoint groups and users - This article explains how SharePoint groups can help you manage permission levels for a set of users at one time. Using groups is more efficient and less painful than managing permission levels for each individual, especially if you need to change permissions along the way. To see the bigger picture of managing site access, see the Roadmap for giving users access to SharePoint Server 2007 sites and site content.

·        Demos: A six-part series on getting the most out of SharePoint Designer 2007 – This set of demos gives you an overview of SharePoint Designer features, including its user interface and design tools, customizing SharePoint sites, modifying layout pages, creating rules-based workflow applications, building composite no-code SharePoint applications, and working with Visual Studio.

·        Watch this: Design a document workflow solution – This video series about SharePoint Designer 2007 presents an end-to-end scenario, starting with the necessary site components and ending with saving the solution as a site template so that you can reuse it. Customers have told us that they find the examples in this video help them with their own real-life situations.

·        Case studies about saving money - In the wake of world economic pressures, you might be interested in learning how other companies have used SharePoint Server to help save money. Click on the tabs to explore how companies have improved their infrastructure -- for example, by consolidating content that was spread out in different systems– and enabled their employees to be more productive.

We look forward to hearing from you. Thanks in advance for your insight.

Toni

SharePoint End User Content Team