Last Thursday, Mark Miller and I presented our last workshop of the year, dedicated to the SharePoint Gantt view.

As for previous workshops, I had prepared some customizations (7 to be precise), each packaged as a Web Part. As I was detailing them, I received some great feedback from Mark and the participants, on the usability of each solution. One advantage of these client side scripts is that the code is accessible and can be easily tweaked, so we were able to make changes in real time, that the participants tested immediately in their own sandbox.

After the workshop, I finalized the scripts and added a couple notes. I also added two more Web Parts, also based on the comments I had received. And one participant, Jeremy, shared another variation he had worked on after the workshop. What a teamwork!

Mark and I share the same view of what training should be. When we say live workshops, we mean it:
– live: the participants have their word to say, and their reactions drive the pace of the session.
– workshop: what is important is not what we show, but what the participant is able to accomplish.

Mark and I will team up again in January for a new series, and I am really looking forward to it!

If possible, I’d like to take the experience even further, and tune up the workshops content based on your feedback. We have already heard from several people that it would be good to have an introduction to jQuery for non-programmers, and we are working on this.