Customer Reviews

Essential SharePoint 2007: A Practical Guide for Users, Administrators and Developers

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3 star:		(1)
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I bought this book looking for answers beyond the basic user level and failed to find any. The book is good at giving overviews of features in SharePoint 2007 and the pictures are a plus. However, this book does not go into enought detail on topics a SharePoint site administrator should really know. For example, I can NOT find anything here on how to utilize the Gannt view list for projects. There is also no information on how to create and utilize KPI (Key Performance Indicator) list templates! The book only glosses over the definition and does not go into further detail. At the sametime, it goes into detail about including images and flash animations by adding HTML codes; something meant for very advanced users. There is no user level consistency in this book which is truly disappointing. I have found more answers by experimenting on SharePoint myself than through this book. Don't waste your money here.

This book is well-written and covers a good range of SharePoint topics. I find it more readable than "The Definitive Guide" (Pyles et al.), another O'Reilly book on the subject. I haven't done a side-by-side comparison of topics covered, but I would definitely recommend reading this one first if you're new to SharePoint.

This book quickly jumps into very complex issues that are above and beyond what the average end-user and even power-user needs. It often uses terminology that most users would not be familiar with. It also often tells you how to "do" but now "why", so the reader feels like they are following instructions blindly.

Effective planning for a Sharepoint MOSS 2007 rollout is best addressed in Essential Sharepoint. The "High-Impact" subtitle is the key - this book methodically enforces the principal purpose of MOSS - Communication, Collaboration, Consolidation and Consistency - through a conscientious introduction in Chapters 1-3 followed by implementation aspects in Chapters 4-13. Appendix A guides you through most common Sharepoint tasks and provides fodder for your own User Manual. This book especially assist in Enterprise-wide intranet development. It helps ensure that you develope governance strategies and thoroughly plan. The result is a comprehensive technology worker dashboard for continuous data/document access and organization-wide collaboration at its best.

I normally really like the O'Reilly books. They are concise and informative, both as a learning guide and a reference manual. This book however, did not seem to fit that mold. I went to the Microsoft SharePoint training site online and have learned much more (quicker) than I could get out of this book. Disappointed.

Its informative and fills in gaps in an easily accessible manner. I've have had consistantly good experiences with O'Reilly books.