MCM SharePoint 2010–Pre-Reading List

If you’re studying for the MCM SharePoint 2010 certification (or simply want to learn loads about SharePoint) then the MCM SharePoint 2010 Pre-Reading List is an essential corpus of reference materials that needs to be read and understood prior to attending the MCM training.

The pre-reading list consists of approx. 240 links to TechNet, MSDN, blogs and other publicly available materials (all of which are free) that are all essential reading. The articles are split into the several topics, and there are a number of articles per topic. But here’s the kicker – each article on the reading list contains links to related and important information that needs to be read and understood also. Consequently, a topic may only have a dozen articles but this could easily expand to 100+ pages that need to be learnt.

I’ve worked my way through the topics below (those that have an ‘expands to’ figure listed) and typically these articles hyperlink to 3, 4 or 5 levels deep. I though the table would prove interesting reading for anyone tackling the pre-reading list:

Topic	# articles	expands to approx.
Architecture and Planning	35	549
Business Connectivity Services	18	117
Business Continuity Management	20	78
Business Intelligence	18	146
Capacity Management	7	47
Enterprise Application Development	34	438*
Enterprise Content Management	14	19 – virtually all covered by Architecture and Planning
Enterprise Search	9	54 – mostly covered by Architecture and Planning / Enterprise Application Development
InfoPath Forms Services	3	0 – all covered in Architecture and Planning & Enterprise Application Development **
Monitoring & Operations	9	104
Performance Testing & Tuning	10	28
Profiles / Social	9	8 – virtually all covered by Architecture and Planning / Enterprise Application Development
Security	25	46 – mostly covered by Architecture and Planning
Storage Planning & Maintenance	9	32
Upgrades	9	71
Web Content Management	5	7 – virtually all covered by Architecture and Planning
Workflow	5	12 – mostly covered by Architecture and Planning
Total:	239	1756
+ Other: White Papers, Best Practice Guides, Diagrams etc..		78
+ Videos		51hr 29mins

* I generally stopped expanding the Enterprise Application Development articles after I started to navigate past the first level of the object model.

** Excluded the 280+ Fast Protocol documents.

Please note, the ‘expands to’ figures are based on my categorisation of topics. For example, the TechNet article ‘Storage and SQL Server capacity planning and configuration (SharePoint Server 2010)’ http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc298801.aspx is references directly by the Capacity Management topic and linked to via articles under the Storage Planning & Maintenance topic. Is these cases I have only included the articles in the counts for a single topic.

I started this lot in April and have spent 3 or 4 hours on it a day – I suspect I’ve spent > 500hrs going through all the materials.

Enjoy!