Customer Reviews

Essential SharePoint 2007

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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.

I have done a number of sharepoint implementation as a consultant, and I would say that this book offers the same type of strategy I've known for the last few years. When tackling a sharepoint implementation a number of questions are needing to be answered. Most people do not know what to ask and what to take into consideration. I would say if you read this book, you'll at least have the basic questions ready and an understanding on how to match the portal capabilities to the needs of the organization. Chapters 1 - 7 offer a good insight on how to plan out the portal. Governance alone is a great topic, most companies don't even consider it. Most companies think that you turn it on and it runs, this book looks at how to keep the portal relevant in the business.

One area that is not covered is IRM, although this is a big topic, and worthy of a book in itself, it should at least had a section or a chapter dedicated to it. I didn't see one.

I recommend this book as a great resource for planning a portal implementation, its high level, but gets the point across and gives plenty to consider.

Unlike most SP books out there at the moment, isn't all about how to install, set-up, administer, and write custom code for a SP deployment. It's much more aimed at end users, and people who need to plan a collaboration strategy around a shared knowledge base.

While a lot of it is management-theoretical in the first few chapters, it's sensible advice that gets one to think about things that are necessary to address, but wouldn't automatically have come to mind. The central message of "the 4 Cs" communication, collaboration, consolidation, and consistency help one to both recognize what's good, and also how to get there.

I think that chapters 1-3 are required reading for anyone in a human management role who will be involved with rolling out SharePoint as a collaboration tool.

Chapters 4-7 are more aimed at admins, so I skipped them.

Chapter 8 is great for individual site planning with "how to" and, more importantly "why to" and "when not to" advice on blogs, wikis, team sites, and their coherent integration.

The fastest payback for a reader comes in Appendix A which documents 24 things that a SP user needs to know how to do, from adding a files to a document library, to targeting information visibility by audience type.

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.

The Amazon page for this book contains a bundle with another book, SharePoint 2007 Unleashed. I have both books, and the bundle makes sense.

The other book in the bundle, SharePoint 2007 Unleashed, is for the SharePoint administrator and those involved in the nitty gritty features of MOSS2007. It contains almost everything you need to know to install and configure a MOSS2007 server in several scenarios. Very thorough. Very technical. It's not for everyone.

The current volume, Essential SharePoint 2007 is a much less intimidating way to get started. First of all it's much shorter and lighter. Second, the book is much more accessible to the less technically minded without stinting on facts.

We've found though that the biggest advantage of the book is in bringing the stakeholders along in the planning of a MOSS implementation. Essential SharePoint 2007 provides our very technically savvy group with an understanding of SharePoint's capabilities and the implications of making different configuration choices. If getting buy-in on features from your stakeholders is a problem, sharing this book can help a great deal.

The book is also good support for those folks in your organization whom you've given the right to create their own sites. There's plenty of detail on the ways sites are created, configured, customized and managed, without wasting time on details not yet needed.

As the title says; it's the essentials.

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.

Good overview of the product. Give architects and generalists a quick feature listing, with some depth on working with the features. If you're a developer it will help you know what's there to work with, but no real coding samples. If you're an administrator, then this definately is helpful.

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.

I read this book several years ago when the company I was working for began their first SharePoint implementation. Since then, I've kept this book within arm's reach on my bookshelf, with most pages highlighted and bookmarked. It's a perfect book to read first, when you are asking questions like, "How should we organize SharePoint? What will provide the best business value? Which parts of SharePoint do we need to learn first?" and so forth. I would make it mandatory reading for new Content Managers and Site Administrators, anyone who is concerned with SharePoint ROI. Additionally, there's "just enough" technical information to help users understand the SharePoint framework, and for new administrators, it provides a good, high-level overview for subjects that can be studied further later. Best of all, the writing style is conversational, easy to understand, and will not put you to sleep like many technical books. I'm excited that they have published a 2010 version of this book and am looking forward to reading the new edition.

Great book! It contains details of hands on exercises which make this book better than many of others with the same topic.