Customer Reviews

Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 Bible

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The content of the book attracted me to buy it. Unfortunately I was frustrated with the lack of explanation on almost every topic I was trying to research.
It is a 'demonstrative' book, not a learning one. they show you 'how to' click here and there and in which sequence to do what. Well, I could have figure out that myself by just going through the screens. But I could not find a single topic where they will explain how things glue together, how to apply a specific feature in different scenarios or ways, or how illustrate the extent of the power of any given feature.
I personally was specificaly interested on how the multiple data bound controls & sources work and found the text very useless.
Went into a couple more topics, like workflow implementation and customizing lists and found the same pattern.
I'll reccomend save the money on this one. I found Professional Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 (Wrox Programmer to Programmer) a much better book (to my surprise) as I generally have found multi-author books to be very bad. Bought both together, I'm keeping the wrox one and I'm re-selling this one here.

Sadly, this book tries to be all things to all people and fails at most. I suspect this is not the fault of the author but rather the publisher who probably dictated the content of the book. The book suffers from a lack of good examples and only a few sparse exercises. It has, however, mastered the art of giving high level statements with very little actual information.

If you are interested in learning the ins and outs of manipulating your SharePoint sites, master pages, templates etc. this book offers very little. Seeing as how that is what people actually want SP Designer to do, this is too bad.

About a quarter of the book is dedicated to work flows. There are at least three other books solely devoted to work flows. Someone running a Microsoft focus group must have took a note "people are interested in work flows" and boom - over kill! These are just not that complicated.

On the flips side, another quarter of the book focuses on hooking into data sources (provided they are on your site). No mention of the fact that the most powerful aspect - the external data linking - BDC-requires the enterprise license which is not standard and costs extra. The attempt to deal with data connections gets bogged down pretty quickly in jargon and assumptions that you have been working with data connections in the past. If you are veteran of hooking up DBs on websites, this section may be helpful.

Finally, the book also attempts to give a lip service for those poor fools who might attempt to use SP Designer for regular sites. Yikes! Don't bother. There are much better tools for that. You won't learn much from this book as it attempts to give you an html primer but falls flat on its face. Get a real book for that.

Learning about SharePoint Designer is complicated. Especially because in order to be successful you need to first know about lot more than just SharePoint Designer. Fortunately, the SPD bible comes to the rescue.

If you are new to SPD, this is the book for you. The author assumes nothing about your understanding of SPD or SharePoint. It seems like great pain has been taken to make you comfortable with the products that SPD depends on without loosing context.

Particularly, I liked the parts of the book that discuss about the Web Controls, Data forms and Workflows. This book is deep in these areas. By far, the best book if you want to learn about building workflows using SPD. No other book actually even tries to talk about them in this detail in one place.

The book does over do some areas for the sake of completeness. I mean most people are smart enough to figure out how to insert pictures or iframes on web pages, but these are still discussed.

Overall, this is a great effort to create an overall manual for the SPD.

While I did not spend much time trying out other exercises in this book, I liked the workflow exercises/sample scenarios that the book takes you through. I had long been confused about a number of SPD workflow dialog boxes, however trying out the exercises helped me clear some doubts. I would certainly recommend this book to some one using SPD to create workflows.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 is a reworking of Microsoft's older FrontPage product, customized to work with SharePoint.

It is a difficult tool to describe because several disciplines must be learned to master it and, more importantly, there are so many different uses to which it can be put.

"Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007" is an attempt to put everything one needs to know in one place. It sort of succeeds and sort of doesn't.

It provides a somewhat superficial overview of designing for the web immediately after an even more superficial overview of server technologies. Quite honestly, if you don't have a background in both these subjects, this book will not help you. It is more a review tool than a teaching tool.

The rest of the book follows the same path: lots of subjects, with none of them covered in any real depth.

This might be useful as a lightweight reference, but for the SharePoint beginner and the experienced user, it simply doesn't cut the mustard. That is not so much the fault of the author, whose style is good, but of the too broad scope of the book.

Jerry