We’ve recently announced the availability of brand new Lync awareness and end-user education materials, including posters, table tents, stickers, and multiple quick reference cards. These kinds of materials are typically leveraged in readiness & adoption engagements at customers to assist with the adoption of the technology deployment.

Paul Andrew recently blogged about two training courses for implementing SharePoint solutions. Each of these courses contains 15 modules representing 5 days of instructor led training and each module includes video lessons, hands-on labs, and a quiz:

• SharePoint Enterprise Content Management Implementers Course
  This course teaches implementers how to leverage features in SharePoint Server to implement an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system. ECM systems are designed to manage large amounts of content, including content in the form of documents and content in pages, wiki libraries, blog posts, and other types of non-document content. Document management is the heart of ECM. This course develops the key skills that are necessary to deploy SharePoint Server for ECM solutions at organizations of any size.
• SharePoint for Internet Sites Implementers Course
  This course describes how to implement and brand a SharePoint based public website using SharePoint web content management (WCM). After the course is completed, you may be able to implement a SharePoint deployment of a branded website with structured content management. You may also be able to successfully plan, deploy, monitor, and maintain an Internet site. No development experience is required, but experience with HTML and CSS is recommended.

The Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit is an agentless inventory, assessment, and reporting tool that can securely assess IT environments for various platform migrations - including the Windows Azure Platform. It gets your cloud migration planning process going with automated discovery and detailed inventory reporting of web applications, application portfolios, and database readiness for the Windows Azure platform.

Catalog all of the applications in your environment:
Inventory and report on web application portfolios and SQL Server database instances in your environment.

Azure Readiness Assessment & Capacity Assessment:

• Estimate the needed capacity to run your applications on the Windows Azure Platform
• Evaluate applications based on migration difficulty
• Stack rank applications in terms of migration suitability
• Obtain a TCO-ROI analysis for the application
• Helps you to plan for the migration of on-premises workloads to Windows Azure and SQL Azure

Other MAP scenario’s:

• Windows 7 & Internet Explorer
• Windows Server 2008 R2
• Hyper-V Consolidation (read how Banque de Luxembourg used MAP for their virtualization project)
• Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track
• SQL Server 2008 R2
• Microsoft Office 2010 & Office 365
• Software Licensing and Asset Management

The Belgian SQL Server User Group has announced their SQL Server Days 2011 on 14 & 15 November. With top Belgian and international speakers, this event is not to be missed by SQL Server experts.

SQL Pass invites SQL Server professionals to their 24 hours webcasts series as a preview on their 2011 summit.

From their website “24 Hours of PASS: Summit Preview”:

Indulge in free online SQL Server training with the upcoming 24 Hours of PASS: Summit Preview event September 7 and 8. Join knowledgeable SQL Server experts - slated to present in-depth sessions at PASS Summit 2011 - as they preview their SQL Server session topics over these 24 free technical webcasts.

Seats for this virtual event are limited and will fill up quickly so make sure you register today.

More info at http://www.sqlpass.org/24hours/fall2011/ or register here.