In SharePoint 2007 there is a well known trick for opening up a list’s forms (New/View/Edit) in design mode – append ?ToolpaneView=2 onto the url – this is often used to add instructions or javascript using a Content Editor Web Part (CEWP) e.g.

• Showing a records ID on the View and Edit forms
• Setting a default duration for new SharePoint calendar events

However when I first tried to use my tried and tested shortcut in SharePoint 2010 I came a little unstuck as now the New/View/Edit forms appear in a fake popup window and modifying the URL doesn’t work.

There are two ways to do this in SharePoint 2010 – and once you know where to find them they should actually make life that little bit easier.

The first is to open up the form in a new window and then add ToolpaneView=2 onto the end of the URL, so

Right click on Add new Item or the lists Title field and select Open in New Tab or hold down CTRL while left clicking.

Alternatively you can do this using the new-fangled ribbon toolbar – select under List Tools the List tab, then on the right hand side of the ribbon you should see an icon for Form Web Parts which gives a menu of the different forms associated with the list that you can edit.

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We often hear that communication is key to the success of any enterprise or organization. Making people aware of “what’s going on” is an essential.  So for a collaboration platform like SharePoint tools for telling people what’s happening are a central part of the setup.

SharePoint has it’s built in “Alert Me” feature.  New users seeing this often expect it to deliver functionality similar to that which comes as standard in MS Outlook.  But that isn’t what SharePoint Alerts do.  They tell you when something is added or changed.  This is great for document or content management, but not so good for managing calendars or tasks or projects – when you might prefer to be alerted when something is about to happen, or is overdue – or you might actually want to alert someone else, not yourself.

So here’s a little look at some of the things you might expect to be able to do with SharePoint Alerts but can’t.  And some suggestions as to how you might get round these shortcomings.

#1: Date Based Alerts

“It’s Jenny’s Birthday tomorrow”

“Your meeting starts in 10 Minutes.”

“Your expenses claim Submission is now overdue.”

How handy would this be?  You could do all of this in Outlook. But it’s just not how SharePoint Alerts work.  They don’t recognise or react to dates.

SharePoint Reminder web part however, is a different story.

As you can see, with Reminder you have the flexibility to send due soon and overdue emails for all of your tasks and events.  And you have a great deal of flexibility in terms of choosing the timescales that you wish to work on with setting for everything from months to minutes.

#2: Customize Alert Emails.

SharePoint sends out standardized alert emails which you can’t edit. Here’s one that has been sent out on a staff absence list to a line manager who needs to approve a requested absence:

Maybe it’s just me, but from this email I would find it very hard to figure out exactly what it is I am meant to do.  And there is no way to edit the email set up without getting into coding.

The email below on the other hand has been generated by SharePoint Reminder web part, triggered by the addition of the same item to the same list:

OK, now I know what I am supposed to be doing with this!  It’s an email addressed to me, with a meaningful subject line, a relevant selection of data from the list, free text that tells me what I should be doing with it and even color and bolding to highlight important points.  All this is achieved from within a simple WYSIWYG text editor.

For full details on customizing your alert emails check out the manual.

#3 Choose who you send alert email to

With SharePoint out of the box alerts, unless you are set up as a SharePoint site owner, the only person you can send alerts to is yourself.

So this means for example that if I have a list for absence requests and I want line managers to receive an alert every time a new staff absence request is added, I have to get each of the managers to turn on those alerts themselves, or get the SharePoint administrator to do it.

With SharePoint Reminder on the other hand, I have huge flexibility in terms of who I send my alerts to:

I can email to any email address in a column in my list.  So in this case I can choose to send my absence request emails to the line manager who needs to authorize that absence.  If the people I want to send my email to are part of my SharePoint installation – registered SharePoint users – the relevant column only needs to contain the person’s name and SharePoint will select the relevant email address.

But it gets even better.  I can choose to send email to people outside of SharePoint and outside of my company.  So for example if I had an order status list with included a column for customers email addresses I could choose to have Reminder send the customer when an email when their order has been dispatched.

Reminder has even more options for who you can send your alert emails to – check out the manual to see all the possibilities.

#4: Send Alerts to People Even if They Don’t Want Them

You know the kind of situation  – department managers really need to know every time there is a new customer complaint relating to their department – but actually some managers would rather not here about it,  With SharePoint’s Alert Me feature each user manages their own Alerts.  So the department manager who really doesn’t care how hacked off customers are with him and his team can just choose to switch off these Alerts.

So any one of your department managers can choose to just opt out of receiving alerts from the list, and you, as the Customer Complaints Manager will never be any the wiser.

With Reminder, you as the Customer Complaints Manager are the owner of the Alert, you set it up to go to whoever you want it to go to. A combination of permissions and visibility of the web part page make it much more difficult for anyone other than you to tamper with the setup.

The key difference is that whilst out of the box Alert Me lets you manage your own alerts, Reminder can be much more effective as “the office nag” – setting up alerts and reminders for relevant groups based around your business processes.

#5: Reply to a Real Person

How often have your replied to an email only to have your response bounce back  – telling you that the address you are writing to is a “no reply” address? This is very likely what will happen if you ever try to reply to a SharePoint “Alert Me” email.  SharePoint is set up so that replies to emails it generates can only go to one address, for the whole web application (that will usually be your whole organization, or site).  So organizations often set this up as a “no reply” address, or some sort of a dump box address, as it is likely to get so many emails that it will become completely unmanageable.

Clearly there are lots of occasions where this will not be ideal – the customer orders scenario we talked about above for example.  You clearly wouldn’t want an email from your customer, telling you that their order still hasn’t arrived, to bounce back, or just disappear into a black hole.

With Reminder you can choose who responses to each alert go to:

Replies can go to someone named in one of your list fields (the Account Manager perhaps?) or you can manually enter an email address for all replies to a particular alert to go to.  Either way you have the ability to ensure that a reply to an alert email will be received by a real person who can act on it.

So these are my top 5 things I always thought I should be able to do with SharePoint Alerts – what are yours?

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Now we all know that SharePoint Lists are pretty amazing things: easy to use, searchable, customizable… Where would we be without them?

But did you know that each list type comes with its own special “Superpower”?

If you understand the different superpowers of each list type it makes choosing which list to use on any given occasion much easier.

Calendar Lists – Repeating Events

For the meeting every Monday, or the staff Birthday list, or the equipment that needs to be serviced every six months Repeating events are what you need.

You have plenty of flexibility to set up your events to repeat daily, weekly, monthly or yearly, when to start them, when to finish them and how many recurrences to include.  So this is the superpower you need if you want to avoid manual entry of events that repeat regularly.

It would be nice to be able to get a little Reminder of upcoming repeating events: “It’s Jane’s Birthday next week.” for example.  Of course this isn’t possible with SharePoint out of the box, as SharePoint alerts don’t offer a date based alert option, like the one you get in Outlook.  You can of course get “Due Soon” and “Overdue” alerts for your Repeating Events with our Reminder webpart.

It would also be pretty super to be able to see your repeating events on the Gantt view of you Calendar list – but you can’t do this either. On a SharePoint out of the box Gantt your weekly team meeting will display as one loooong event, whereas with a Gantt chart created from the same list using our Planner web part, repeating events will display exactly as you would want them to.

(That’s the end of the shameless product plugs now – promise.)

Task List – Assigned To

If you want to stop stuff falling through the cracks this is the one to go for.  You know the drill:

“Have you booked the flights  to the SharePoint Conference?”

“No I thought you were doing that?”

“No, I told you to book them!” . . .

With the Task List (and also Issues and Project Task lists) “Assigned To” feature this need never happen again, as you can ensure that all of your tasks have an owner and that the owner of a task gets an email every time a task is assigned to them.  But there are two things you need to do to ensure this superpower works as it should do.

First, although “Assigned To” is one of the default fields in this list type, it isn’t set up as a mandatory field, so when you set your task list up be sure to change your list settings to make entry of data into this field compulsory.

Second, you have to remember to switch email notifications on. This is done in List Settings – Advanced Settings.

Following these 2 simple steps will have your Task List Superpower fully loaded and ready to go.

Of course it would be great if the owner of the task got an email when the task is due, but that doesn’t happen with SharePoint out of the box – however, if you use our Reminder webpart . . . . .

(OK, so I work in marketing, I start to twitch if I see an opportunity for a product plug and miss it.)

Issue List – Comments History

This is ideal for when you just need to know exactly what has been happening over the course of time – who said or did what, when and to whom.  It’s ideal for service desk issues, customer complaints, maybe staff performance tracking.

Whilst all SharePoint lists offer a Version History which is great for audit and compliance, version histories can quickly get a bit unwieldy and difficult to manager.  The Issues list Comments History lets you see what has been going on at a glance – Kryptonite!

Discussion Lists-Threaded Discussions

You know those group emails, about a particular project, the annual conference, the monthly sales figures.  It’s the email that gets sent to 40 people asking for comments and feedback which quickly becomes an unmanageable mess as you lose track of who is replying to whom and exactly which email response the boss is so very angry about.

Threaded discussions solve all this be letting you see exactly who commented when, who has replied to what, and how the weird tangent that Bill and Sue have wandered off on got started in the first place.

These have some similarities to the comments history superpowers enjoyed by Issue Lists, but where version history just lets you see a chronological sequence of events, Threaded Discussions lets you see the relationship between those events.  To anyone who has ever taken part in forum discussions it will look quite familiar.

If you have any other superheroes who you think deserve a mention we’d love to hear about them.

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There is a great deal of confusion around some terms related to the different levels of SharePoint hierarchy. Some of this is buzword overload and some  has been brought about by inconsistent usage from Microsoft (and to be fair actually most of us in this industry).

So if you’ve ever wondered what things like Farm, WFE, NLB, Web Application, Site Collection and Top Level Site mean I am going to try and clarify the different terms without getting too technical as some of this stuff needs to be know by advanced, or power, users. I’ve missed out some of the more esoteric things like managed paths in the interests of readers sanity.

General Terms

Request

• When you load a page each element (including the page itself) makes a request to SharePoint and receives some data – which can be html, images, files etc.

Network Load Balancer (NLB)

• A device to distribute requests from your users browsers to the Web Front Ends

Web Front Ends – (WFE)

• A collection of servers that take requests from users (via the NLB), process them and return the data.
• This is the primary method for scaling – as the number of users grow you add more WFE’s.

Database

• The database servers store all volatile data (i.e. data that changes) in SharePoint.
• You have exactly 1 configuration database and 1 to many content databases.
• Each content database can only be on 1 server (more technically if you consider failover servers) but you can have different content databases on different servers – another method of scaling with increased load.

Authorisation and Authentication

• Authentication is the process of deciding WHO a user is.
• Authorization is the process of deciding WHAT they can do.
• IIS (the web server) handles Authentication alongside things like Active Directory and SharePoint handles authorization.
• Authentication methods include things like Anonymous, Basic, Forms, Integrated (NTML/Kerberos and Claims).

Farm

• A collection of servers (web, database, index) that together make up a SharePoint Installation – aka Topology.
• You can do all this (web/datababase/index etc) on a single server in “Simple Installation” mode in which case you don’t need a NLB. For many small businesses this is plenty enough.
• Medium sized businesses usually start with at least 2 Web Front Ends (WFE’s) and a database server.
• Multinationals can have some very complex setups involving dozens of components.

A common small SharePoint Farm topology - two WFE servers and a database server.

Levels of the SharePoint Hierarchy When you hear someone talking about ‘Scope’ this is what they mean.

Farm

• The entire installation as a whole. So if something has “Farm” level scope it applies to everything.

Web Application

• An IIS Website that has been configured to run SharePoint.
• Can only be created in the Central Admin UI (or via the STSADM tools etc)
• A Farm has one running the central administration site and 1 to many others running normal SharePoint sites.
• This is generally how the main part of the URL is defined – e.g. http://somesite.yourcompany.com and http://othersite.yourcompany.com will be separate Web Applications.
• This authentication method is set at the Web Application level – though you can have the same content (i.e. SharePoint site) delivered by two different web applications with two different authentication methods.
• Port and network card bindings, host headers and a host of other networky stuff is set at the Web Application level – so if you want external users, for example, to have access to a site that would apply at the Web Application level (you can apply more granular restrictions using authorization security though).
• The Application Pool (the account that SharePoint runs under and the resources that it can consume) are also set at the Web Application level.

Note – Used to be known as “Virtual Server” before the days of Virtualization technologies.

Site Collection

• Each web application has at least 1 Site Collection (but can have many).
• Each Site collection has exactly 1 ‘Top Level Site’.
• The Site Collection doesn’t actually contain anything itself - that is down to the Top Level Site.
• This is the level that things like the Recycle bin and Quotas are organised at.
• Each site collection can only use a single content database (though multiple site collections can us the same content database) – this has major design implications as there are maximum recommended sizes for a content database.

Top Level Site

• A Top Level Site is a site… at the top level… see – this terminology is not that confusing after all
• Most of the time we can use Top Level Site and Site Collection interchangeably - in fact Microsoft do this all the time.
• Each Top Level Site has zero to many sub-sites (simply called sites)
• This is the lowest level that many things can be scoped to, for example only the Top Level site contains a web part Gallery so you can’t say Collection X, Site A can have a web part but Collection X, Site B can’t.
• When you look at Site Settings in a top level site you will see the highlighted sections – in a sub site you will not. Both are called Sites in the UI.

Site

• (aka Web’s) – these are the actual sites that you use.
• A site can be a top-level site or a sub site of the top level site.
• A site can also have other sites – these are called sub-sites.
• Sub sites can also have other sub sites and so on.
• A site can inherit its parent’s permissions or define its own – more on this complex subject in a future article.

Finally a Site! - the thing that you actually use and what most of us think as "SharePoint"

References

• TechNet – Creating Your First Web Application, Site Collection and Web Site
• TechNet – Farm topology management

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Just over a year after moving to Kingshold buildings we are having to move yet again, due to planned expansion.  Not a huge deal though as we are only moving about 2 miles down the road.

Our new offices are based in Cheltenham Film Studios, on the outskirts of the town.  We don’t plan to take up acting, but we think we will benefit from being one of a range of tech and creative companies on this site.

We have plenty of room to grow as a business here, so hopefully we will be able to stay put for the foreseeable future.

I know that physical moves don’t make much difference to most of you, as you tend to deal with us over the phone of email, but just in case you would like to send us an “office warming present” here is our new postal address:

Telephone, fax and email all remain the same.

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Last year, when I first started having dealings with SharePoint, I was mightily confused by all this “MOSS”, “WSS”, “SPS” -stuff.   What did all these acronyms stand for? What was the difference between all these different versions of SharePoint? And did it really matter?

Well, one year on and I’m slightly less confused, but only slightly!  So I thought it might be useful, for me and for anyone else out there who suffers similar confusion, to list out the different versions of SharePoint, their usual acronyms and key distinguishing features – I hope it helps:

So, in the begining, back in 2001, SharePoint emerged as two distinct products.  SharePoint Team Services was a bottom up team collaboration product, SharePoint Portal Server was a top down, portal, search and document management product.

By 2003 Microsoft had gathered that although customers liked both products what they would really like was the capabilities of both, combined.  So in 2003 what most of us would recognise as SharePoint: collaboration, search, content management and portal capabilities all under one roof – was born.

WSS was the basic version, free with Windows Server OS. SPS, the premium version, built on the foundations of WSS, incorporating extra functionality primarily around the areas of search and document management. Jason Masterman and Ted Pattison writing in MSDN Magazine put it quite neatly:

In essence, WSS gives you a place to put all your content while SPS provides the means to navigate and search through your content when you need it.

In 2007 much the same formula was followed, with Windows SharePoint services as the free version for windows server users and Microsoft Office SharePoint Services the premium version.  The MOSS designation references the greater level of integration with the Office suite.

In SharePoint 2010 it’s all change again and Microsoft have dropped references to both Office and Windows, leaving SharePoint to stand alone in 3 basic flavours: foundation, the free version, Standard – the premium version, which adds lots of functionality primarily around the area of search, and Enterprise – super premium, where the extras are pricipally in the area of content management.

This is very much a whistle stop tour, not an attempt to give an all encompassing overview of what is in each of the many SharePoint versions we have seen over the years – but we hope it might help you to at least get the acronyms straight!

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As you’ve probably noticed we have had a few changes on our SharePoint blog in recent weeks.  We’ve been doing some work on making it a little more user friendly and a bit nicer to look at (hope we haven’t spoiled it with the photos!)

Whilst I was working on the blog I noticed that we have quite a few little gems hidden away in the archives. Old posts – things that were written maybe a couple of years ago, that those of you who are new to the blog might not be aware of, but might find useful.  The useful ones fall into a few categories – general SharePoint tricks, tips and ideas, and ideas and tips for users of our web parts.  So here they are, I hope you find them useful.

SharePoint tricks tips and ideas

Extend and customise SharePoint Task lists

Task Lists are one of the best loved and most used features of SharePoint and this post shows you how to better tailor them to meet your particular needs.

Advanced SharePoint View and Filter techniques

This article explores some of the uses of SharePoint Views and Filters.

Working Days, Weekdays and Holidays in SharePoint Calculated Columns

SharePoint Out of the box doesn’t automatically distinguish between working days and weekends but if you are setting things like job duration or due dates you may need to – this article shows you how.

The Truth about using [Today] in SharePoint Calculated Columns

This article explains why the often repeated trick for using [Today] in SharePoint calculated columns does not work, and suggests workarounds.

The … ehem… Truth about using [Today] in SharePoint Filters

This one looks at the differences between SharePoint 2003 and 2007 when using [Today] in filters.

Setting a default duration for new SharePoint Calender Events

So you might be a medical receptionist scheduling appointments for doctors, appointments are always 45 minutes long unless the doctor tells you differently, how much easier would it be to just have SharePoint create an end time 45 minutes after the start time automatically?

How To Use Filters in SharePoint to show items in the current Calendar Month

It’s easy to think of occasions when you might want to filter a SharePoint list to show items falling in the current calendar month: “sales this month” springs to mind, or “subscriptions due for renewal this month”. This post shows you have to achieve this using calculated columns.

SharePoint Reminder Webpart Ideas

SharePoint Reminder Webpart – Setting a variable Due In or Overdue By time

Lots of people use Reminder to send an alert when a message is due soon or overdue.  Usually its fine for the message to go out at a fixed time before or after the event, for all list items, but there are occasions where you might want to vary the times at which you send your alerts.  For example, sending alerts for overdue helpdesk items: for high priority items you might want to send an alert when an item is 1 hour overdue, whereas for low priority an alert for items 1 day overdue might be fine.  This article shows you how.

Customize SharePoint Reminder Emails with Merge Data

Whilst SharePoint’s out of the box alert emails come in a standard format, with Reminder its possible to customize the alert emails you send by merging data from your list items.

Tip – don’t send SharePoint email alerts for old items.

There are some situations where, when you are setting up a Reminder for the first time, you could end up sending out alerts for a lot of very old list items, this post shows you how to avoid doing that.

Tip – Sending an SharePoint email Alert when a Task is completed

If you are using Reminder to drive simple workflow you may very well want to send an email when a task is completed – maybe when a holiday request form has been filled in for example.  This post shows you how.

SharePoint Planner Webpart Ideas

Tip – Showing multiple columns in SharePoint Planner Webpart

There may be times when you want to display timeline or category information from more than one list column in a gantt chart. For example in the chart below we have taken information from the “priority” and “title” columns of a list to populate the category labels.

5 things you never knew you couldn’t do with SharePoint Gantt Charts

Shows you a few of the things that aren’t possible with SharePoint OOTB gantt charts, but can be done with Planner.

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Warning -  this post is somewhat techie so if you’re not a developer you may want to go find something more interesting to do!

I’ve been doing some work with SharePoint Feature Receivers recently and found the official documentation to be somewhat … lacking.

SharePoint Feature Receivers allow you to run code when a Feature such as a web part or template is installed, activated, deactivated and removed. They are often used for installation/setup tasks that can’t be done using XML incantations in Manifest.xml, Elements.xml and Feature.xml.

I am not going to give a step-by-step guide to Feature Receivers (see the excellent How to add a Feature Receiver to a Feature from SharePoint dev wiki) but plan to detail information that I was struggling to find anywhere else.

I am only going to cover the scenario of a Feature encapsulated in a solution package and not installing features directly using STSADM -o InstallFeature as that requires the files are manually placed in the 12\Template\Features\ directory so is not as friendly as distributing .wsp files and is not something that you can really give to customers/server admins.

Scope

SharePoint Features can be targeted at the Farm, Web Application, Site Collection or Web Site scope. The target will effect things like where you can manage the feature activation from in the UI and at which point (and how many times) the Feature receiver events are called.

SharePoint Feature lifecycle

SharePoint Administration Timer Jobs

Deployment and Retraction actually setup a timer job (which can be executed ‘immediately’ or at a specified time. If the “Windows SharePoint Services Administration” Service is not running then you will be warned that these jobs will not be executed and you can force execution by running STSADM -o ExecAdmSvcJobs on all servers in your farm.

Windows Identity

You can’t be sure which windows identity a feature event receiver will be running under as you don’t know if it will be called by STSADM (cmd.exe), “Windows Share Services Administration” timer service (WSSADMIN.EXE) or the WebUI (w3wp.exe with the app pools identity) – so ensure you are not relying on privileges (for example) that may be given to a logged on domain admin when using STSADM but not the app pools identity.

SharePoint Context

Because you can’t be sure where the FeatureReceiver is being called from (command line, timer service, web ui) you can’t use the normal method of getting a SPSite/SPWeb object.

SPSite site = SPContext.Current.Site;

SPWeb web = SPContext.Current.Web;

Instead you can access the context through SPFeatureReceiverProperties.Feature.Parent see Matt’s handy extension method (beware though, it doesn’t cover Web Application or Farm scopes)

Note – you only get a SPFeatureRecieverProperties.Feature reference with FeatureActivated and FeatureDeactivating – its null for Installed and Uninstalling.

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How annoying is it when you get reminded about something you have already done?  A little email saying:

“Can you please submit your expenses claim form by 12.00 noon today”

is just sooo annoying when actually you have been a good girl and done your expenses yesterday.

We get lots of support calls from SharePoint Reminder webpart users who have annoyed their team members in just this way – by sending our Reminder emails for tasks that have already been completed.

This is easy enough to do.  Reminder will look at the whole of a list unless you tell it to do something else.  So if you ask Reminder to send out an email for everyone who is tasked to complete their expenses claim form by 12.00 today that is exactly what it will do, regardless of whether the status of that task is “Active” or “Completed”.

Some users ask why Reminder doesn’t just work on “Active” tasks by default.  There are good reasons for this.  For example there may well be occasions when you want to send out reminders on completed tasks.

“You have completed your assignment for ZYX Corp, please ensure that all appropriate time has been billed”

or maybe to a line manager:

“John Smith has completed module 256 of the company training program, please arrange a training review meeting.”

But for those times when sending a reminder for completed items just isn’t appropriate you need to ensure that Reminder is watching the “Active” view of your Task or Issues list, rather than the entire list.

Because this is easy to forget we have added a little tip in the Reminder Configuration tool:

This message displays when you ask Reminder to watch the entire task list, and disappears if you select a view.

For more information here is the relevant SharePoint Reminder Webpart manual page.

Filtering is a really great way to get more out of SharePoint Reminder, once customers start to explore the power of filters they generally come up with a whole host of new ways that Reminder could save them time and trouble.  For example you might want to filter on priority, and send a team manager alerts on overdue high priority tasks once a week. For more ideas on using filters take a look at this blog post.

You can download the new version of SharePoint Reminder Webpart here.  The new version of Reminder is Free of charge to all existing customers and will install directly over the top of your existing version with no disruption to your existing configuration.  Please refer to this page for installation instructions.

For those of you who are not yet using SharePoint Reminder a fully functional 30 day free trail is available to download here.

We hope this is helpful, and is you have any other comments or suggestions please get in touch.

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Last week we had an email from a customer who was confused about his options for SharePoint 2010. He was planning to move his 5 WSS site across to SharePoint 2010 Foundation – but had found this document from Microsoft:

http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/en-us/buy/Pages/Licensing-Details.aspx

which seems to suggest that sites and Workspaces were not available in Foundation, only in SharePoint 2010 standard edition or above.  Well we knew this wasn’t right;  but that wasn’t what the info from Microsoft seemed to be saying.

This gave us a reminder of just how confusing our friends at Microsoft can make things.  So we thought we would gather together some handy resources for all of you who may be thinking of moving over to SharePoint 2010. As always we have focussed mainly on users and administrators.  I hope you find it useful.

First a proper list of features for the different SharePoint 2010 versions:

http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/en-us/buy/Pages/Editions-Comparison.aspx

If you want to download the free SharePoint 2010 Foundation version here’s the link:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=49c79a8a-4612-4e7d-a0b4-3bb429b46595&displaylang=en

Or for the 180 day free trials of the paid versions of SharePoint 2010 try this one:

http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/businessproductivity/products/pages/try-it.aspx?bannerId=2#fbid=xIIGCkpQnQK

For a Virtual Hard Drive, pre-configured with everything you need to get a trial up and running quickly try this:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=751FA0D1-356C-4002-9C60-D539896C66CE&displaylang=en

Then take a look at the walk through guide:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=8c619bef-008b-4af2-9687-8a05848fea97

Take a look at Microsoft’s SP 2010 end user training materials here:

http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/en-us/resources/Pages/End-User-Training-Guide.aspx

Online training sessions on installing, upgrading, branding and social media coming up in June 2010, from SharePoint 911 – $99 per session.

http://www.sharepoint911.com/training/Pages/2010Training.aspx

Basic free end user training videos from point8020.  These aren’t really highlighting differences between 2010 and earlier SP versions, but they are all done in 2010 and there are lots of them, so could be good for the new user:

http://www.point8020.com/SharePointEndUserTraining.aspx

On the books front, Amazon already has an impressive list. You can get SharePoint 2010 for Dummies on paper or Kindle (I do like my “Dummies” books !)

http://www.amazon.com/SharePoint-2010-Dummies-Vanessa-Williams/dp/0470476435/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1274957537&sr=1-2

or “Professional SharePoint 2010 Administration” in the generally reliable Wrox series:

http://www.amazon.com/Professional-SharePoint-2010-Administration-Klindt/dp/0470533331/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1274957537&sr=1-3

And in the same series “Professional Workflow 4 in SharePoint 2010″:

http://www.amazon.com/Professional-Workflow-SharePoint-2010-Solutions/dp/0470617888/ref=sr_1_13?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1274959947&sr=1-13

“Building the SharePoint 2010 user Experience” from Apress also looks interesting for anyone who is a SharePoint champion within their organization:

http://www.amazon.com/Building-SharePoint-2010-User-Experience/dp/1430227753/ref=sr_1_11?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1274957537&sr=1-11

There are lots more books out there, but mostly aimed at developers or focussed on specific features like BCS.

If you’re a developer you might want to take a look at these:

And then finally the most valuable SharePoint 2010 resource of all is clearly our own fabulous range of Pentalogic webparts for SharePoint, which are all 2010 ready!

Sorry, I just couldn’t help myself!

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