Essential SharePoint 2007: Delivering High-Impact Collaboration

When you're making a jump to SharePoint from some other platform (especially a non-Microsoft offering), the sheer size of the package can be daunting. And being dumped into the bits and bytes of SharePoint doesn't help much when you don't have any context for most of it. Essential SharePoint 2007 by Scott Jamison, Mauro Cardarelli, and Susan Handley was the perfect "first book" for me to get my mind wrapped around all that is SharePoint. It's also perfect for the higher level technical user who wants to do more than just the basics. Contents: Your Collaboration Strategy - Ensuring Success; Office SharePoint Server 2007 - High-Impact Collaboration Across the Extended Enterprise; Introduction to the 2007 Office System as a Collaboration and Solution Platform; SharePoint Architecture Fundamentals; Planning Your Information Architecture; Planning Your Move from SharePoint 2003 to 2007 - Upgrade or Build?; Disaster Recovery Planning; Sites, Blogs, and Wikis; Enterprise Content Management - Documents, Records, and Web; Enterprise Search; Making Business Processes Work - Workflow and Forms; Office 2007 - Offline Options for MOSS 2007; Providing Business Intelligence; Appendix A - SharePoint User Tasks; Appendix B - OS/Browser/Office Compatibility; Index I'm switching from developing applications in the Notes/Domino platform to doing the same in SharePoint. But where Notes/Domino is somewhat self-contained, SharePoint has a ton of moving parts (Office, WSS, MOSS, SQL Server, etc.) As such I was having a hard time trying to figure out how to group everything in my mind. Essential SharePoint 2007 turned out to be the perfect way to start my journey. The authors write their material towards technical architects and business analysts who will need to know how to set up and use SharePoint to accomplish their many processes. The specifics of how to use certain features and web parts are detailed enough that you could use it as a first line of training for those who want to do more than just look at pages. The chapters on architecture, disaster recovery, and rolling out SharePoint are perfect for your administration and architecture staff who will have to become responsible for building and maintaining the infrastructure. There are also chapters comparing SharePoint 2003 to the latest version (2007), but if you're familiar with 2003, you might well already have a grasp on much of the material. Fortunately for me, I'm starting with 2007, so migration is not a consideration... While this wouldn't be the only SharePoint book on my shelf, it definitely needs to be there. It won't teach me how to program and customize SharePoint at the level I'll need to be able to down the road. But for getting a good grasp of the overall fundamentals of setup, administration, and use of SharePoint, it's hard to beat.

This book provides a great overview of most of the features and functionality you will need to implement a portal solution using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. It not only discusses the features of SharePoint but it provides great tips and techniques on issues like planning, migrating, creating and governing your portal solution. In addition, it has some good how to sections which walks the reader through the implementation of certain features of the product.

Essential SharePoint 2007 provides amazing guidance on how to architect your site. This book starts with high level concepts that any team implementing a collaboration solution should know. Although there is not a lot of detail on how to customize SharePoint with the object model or through code, this a great book for Business Analysts and Architects looking to improve their skills as well as junior developers wanting to understand how to build a system correctly. If you design and build SharePoint sites and have not read this book, I would recommend reading it. Keep in mind this book is not about developing on SharePoint, as the book points out - this book discusses higher level topics and shows how to interact with SharePoint through the user interface.

This book is a great tutorial as well as a reference. It has a genuine business perspective and does not just tell you how to implement SharePoint, but why you should do it. The subject matter is broad and well organized. The prose is clear and easily understood by the business user. The serious subject matter is lightened with a pervasive enthusiasm for enabling collaboration that is infectious. After reading this book you can't wait to start implementing the principles it describes.

Being a SharePoint architect, I always get asked by clients and end users for resources/books to learn SharePoint functionality. The users don't want to know the gritty programming details, but want to know the functionality at a high level so that they can use the portal to its potential. I have always had a tough time recommending to clients a good book....but now with this book, I feel comfortable as well as confident that clients would feel at home reading this book. The book talks about what collaboration is and how to implement a successful portal. From an end-user perspective it goes through all the out of the box functionality which is available and which can be implemented without writing a single line of code. The search functionality of MOSS has been very well explained. End users can very easily implement out-of-the-box workflows. The publishing features are very clearly explained. Overall, I am very pleased with the book. Bear in mind the audience for this book is not a developer. Its mainly for the business/end-user community.