Sharepoint - Clients Training sessions

Since 2004 I have been involved with Sharepoint projects at work, from the proposals, to the analysis, development, administration and training.

This time I want to focus on the training part at the end of an Sharepoint project. Some clients want to have some kind of training at the end of the project, so that all their staff (or at least a part of it) becomes familiarized with the solution. I have been involved with some of these actions and from my experience (and I don't have any training in teaching), the best way is to divide the sessions in 3 user groups: Reader/Contributor, Web Designer/Content Manager, Administrator.

Usually the 3 sessions are cumulative, it means that an Administrator would have to atend all 3 sessions, an Content Manager would have to attend the first 2 and the readers would just have to attend the first.

It is important that everyone that is going to use the new solution, knows how to work with it, because even though the Sharepoint environment is very intuitive, there are a lot of concepts the are new or at least less known.

The documentation in my opinion should present a preview of the new Intranet, and a overview of the organization structure, to enable the new user to know where he has the contents he wants.

The Help from Sharepoint is an important reference to the user, to teach how to use the Help option, or even to include some of it's content in the documentation can provide valuable and easy to follow instructions to perform the desired tasks.