Customer Reviews

Automating SharePoint 2010 with Windows PowerShell 2.0

5 star:		(7)
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3 star:		(1)
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The title of the book "Automating SharePoint 2010 with Windows PowerShell 2.0" would give most people the impression that the book is all about PowerShell and while this is true. The book is "The most Comprehensive Guidance to SharePoint 2010 Administration".

If you ask how I came to this conclusion open any page of the book and you will find not only the PowerShell reference and scripts but an explanation for every Service Application from Search to Business Connectivity Services both from a configuration and integration perspective as well as the physical and logical alternatives you have when building out your environment. Really I cant stop there if the history of the topic being discussed is of value to the reader, Gary and Shannon have included the history of the topic to give the reader further insight into how or why SharePoint is the way it is..

Automating SharePoint 2010 with Windows PowerShell 2.0 is "The most comprehensive administrative guide on SharePoint 2010". It's obvious the work put into the STSAdm Extensions for SharePoint 2007 and the PowerShell CmdLets for SharePoint 2010 that Gary has given to the SharePoint Community freely has also given Gary deep insight into SharePoint 2010.

The bottom line there are a lot of good books on SharePoint 2010 Administration but if there is only one book you can buy on SharePoint Administration this year then click add to cart...

Thank you Gary, Shannon, and Spence for being a reference for us all..

Cheers,

Ivan Sanders
SharePoint MVP, Developer, Architect, & Evangelist - Dimension Solutions
Blog [...]
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Probably the best book on the subject ever written - simply designed and brilliantly written. This is one of my favourites.

I have followed Gary LaPointe on his blog for years where he has intricately published C# scripts and codeplex projects for helping to learn the SharePoint object model. When Gary decided to take on the PowerShell arena with the beta of 2010 I knew we were in for a treat. Little did I know that Gary would then join forces with Shannon Bray, another very well respected SharePoint consultant and trainer in the US to produce this book.
I recommend this book not just to someone learning PowerShell and SharePoint, but also for those that understand SharePoint and want to understand how you can automate the installations along with automated configurations of things such as Service Applications and Site Collections from an API perspective. The writing style is very easy to consume and it flows really well. The sample scripts that I tried were all very easy to follow and explained in enough detail even for someone with no experience with the API.
I would highly recommend this book to IT Pros looking to write PowerShell code to make them more efficient administrators!

This book covers administration (not automation and that's one of my biggest complain) of SharePoint Server 2010 using power shell. Overall book does a decent job in explaining the concepts but fall short on certain areas. I am really surprised that none of the readers notice these gaps. First of all the word automation is misleading, there are no examples of real automation at all in this book, for example script provided for doing prerequisites install for SharePoint (just one example) will only be run once (I even have to fix some issues there with the exit codes!) unless you add required elements of automation yourself (I associated scripts with Windows Tasks and use WMI objects to ensure that these Tasks do run on all of the desired SharePoint Farm machines). So, simply put lot of extra work to do for real automation (I sense it may be a publisher gimmick to use word 'automation' because author seem to know his stuff)

Another thing that I find annoying is lack of good quality of scripts used throughout in this book. That' a huge led down, considering that you can easily grab reasonable power shell scripts for SharePoint Server 2010 free of charge online. In fact some of it comes from Microsoft own blog post (search for it and you will find it). I would say, that is one area where author should have spend time and produce high quality scripts.

I wouldn't not say that I regret buying this book, but it does not turn out to be as good as every one claims to be.

This book is a must-have resource for SharePoint farm admins looking to automate and manage their deployments. I am finding this book to be heavy on content, light on fluff, and immediately useful. It can be the kind of book that one reads from cover to cover, but it is also useful as a desk reference for when you need to address a specific issue.

This is a must. Windows PowerShell is quickly becoming the center of the Microsoft world and more importantly the SharePoint world. This book helps bridge the gap of the new to PowerShell SharePoint admnistrator and for those who are pros it guides you on some places to look deeper in SharePoint. I am actually kind of jealous I didn't write this book. :)

The authors have done a great job in providing a must-have addition to any SharePoint professional's bookshelf, especially those who's role involves managing and administering SharePoint 2010!

Having studied together with Shannon during the Microsoft Certified Master for SharePoint 2010 training, I know that this book provides valuable content.