Customer Reviews

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Administrator's Companion

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4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

There is a reason why SharePoint 2010 is called a "Platform" and not an application. It is because SharePoint has more to it than anyone could imagine. It is the same with this book. This is the type of book I was looking for to handle the administrative side of SharePoint for SP 2010. I would imagine that if your only focus is to develop web parts, or set up web pages, that you will eventually be looking for an Administrator's book for SharePoint. This would be your book! Additionally, it is impossible to cover every aspect of this book due to its depth. We will look at some of the important concepts covered.

The authors of "Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Administrator's Companion" are: Bill English, Brian Alderman, and Mark Ferraz. It is typical nowadays for all of us to Google the name of any person whom we want to know more about. I did that for these three authors. Each of these three gentlemen has extensive and impressive knowledge and credentials. You can trust what they have to offer in this book. I now have more sources for information as a result of Googling them.

The purpose of SharePoint is collaboration and the very first chapter I found was on collaboration. Then the 2nd chapter covered SP 2010's architecture. In my opinion, these are the two most important concepts about the SP 2010 Platform. In the collaboration chapter, I found this important comment: "Some of the most notable new Web Parts released with SharePoint 2010 are, Silverlight viewer, Media Web Part, Chart Web Part, HTML for Web part, iView Web Part, and Search Web Parts." Can anyone deny the huge increase in development capabilities with SharePoint, You already have the ability to create web sites through SharePoint; however, you now have more options on how and where you will make those modifications which will make yours or your client's sites more interesting and appealing.

A good note for administrators trying to find their way around in SharePoint 2010: "When you are evaluating SharePoint 2010 or performing testing/development activities, a small farm deployment should be sufficient. In fact, you may elect to go with a single server farm configuration for development or configuration testing. Often a developer will elect to use a virtual machine for testing because it's less expensive and can be brought up and down as needed." We had a presentation on how to do this in one of our recent Inland Empire SharePoint User Group meetings. See Chapter 2, Page 83.

Chapter 3 covers optimizing SQL Server 2008 R2 for SharePoint 2010. Chapter 4 covers how to prepare for the SharePoint 2010 installation.

Chapter 22 covers how to upgrade to SP 2010. This is THE chapter to review before you do an upgrade. The steps you must take for a successful upgrade are all spelled out. Chapter 23, Creating and Managing Workflows is a hot topic. Every time I speak to a recruiter about SharePoint, the first two items up for discussion are upgrading and workflows. These are another set of chapters any worthy SharePoint Administrator must know.

Lest this review grow too large, I will stop here and finish with the statement that the basics are all covered from an Administrator's viewpoint, covering the preliminary subjects leading up to the installation upgrading, securing your sites and data, and modifications to the sites, web parts, SQL Server optimization, lists, and so on. No review can do justice to this extensive book, but you can be assured that if you have questions, a majority of them will be answered from this book's content, as it is rich in administrative content for SharePoint 2010. This really is THE book to get.

I am currently in the middle of a very large SharePoint 2007 to 2010 upgrade. I have purchased several books to help me get the job done, and this one is the only one that has really helped.

This book really covers everything on the administration side of SharePoint 2010 in great detail. You can tell the team that wrote it knows the guts of SharePoint 2010. It really is all inclusive. I have not gone to this book looking for answer that I could not find yet.

The CD that comes with the book has the ebook version of the book. They included an XPS version, but it will not open. It says it is corrupt. The XPS version being corrupt doesn't really matter, the PDF version works for finding all the references to a topic quickly.

The CD also includes a 526 page MICROSOFT SHAREPOINT FOUNDATION 2010 CMDLET REFERENCE that really helps find out the details of all the PowerShell commands you can now use with SharePoint.

If you are an Admin for a SharePoint 2010 farm you MUST, I mean MUST, have this book by your side.

Bill English (and company) delivers quality yet again. I've been fortunate and heard Bill present on SharePoint several times. His knowledge and real-world experience is accurate and helpful. I seek out his presentations and books and they are always top-notch.

SharePoint best practices are a difficult thing to define. This book not only provides you with the "how" to perform SP administration; it gives you background on why you have these admin choices in the first place. It does such a good job with the "why" that I am finding a lot of helpful information for use in a document management application I support.

The book begins with a quick overview of what's new in SharePoint and how to use it from an end-user point of view. You can't be a SP administrator (or developer) if you don't have some idea how the end-user will use the product. This chapter gives you a very quick overview (saves you from reading an entire end-user book to gain perspective).

Chapter 2 provides a great overview of SP architecture. I'm not an IT Pro but I need to know enough to ask for (and justify) the servers and databases needed. This chapter gave me enough for this plus an understanding to prepare me to select the right choices during the SP installation.

You repeatedly hear that a SharePoint governance plan is a must. There are many templates to begin from. But it is difficult to determine what should be in YOUR governance plan and how you can convince the organization that creation and adherence to the governance plan is a must for the successful rollout of SharePoint. Chapter 9 - Organizing Information provides both. This chapter takes the huge topic of information architecture and provides background and steps to guide you through creating an architecture. I particularly liked Problem to solution to requirements to governance discussion. This results in each governance item linked back to a requirement (and problem). This will give me what I need to obtain governance buy in. This chapter gives credibility to governance.

There are many chapters you would expect to see in an Admin Companion (Central Admin, PowerShell, etc). These chapters are equally well done providing both the "how" and "why" for administration choices in SharePoint.

All I can say is that there is virutally no question that has ever come up from a cient that I cannot find an answer to in this book. It is literally the bible for SharePoint 2010. It is very dense (and I say that in a good way) in that it does not gloss over things like many other books do. It explain and explains and explains in clear language. Fantastic!

This text is a must-have if you are responsible for architecting and implementing the infrastructure for a SharePoint 2010 farm large or small. It takes you through setting up your Windows and SQL servers, Web Front-End (WFE) servers, application servers, and more. It is also very useful for learning, setting up, and administering most of the SharePoint 2010 Server features.

In these 1150 pages you will find much of the deep conceptual, technical, and instructional material you need as a SharePoint 2010 professional. The included CD gives you a fully searchable eBook version, as well as sample scripts.

I chose this over "Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Administrator's Pocket Consultant" (which appears to be an excellent resource as well) simply because this Administrator's Companion contained a bit more depth on many of the concepts that were important to me.

I obtained a copy of Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Administrator's Companion to use as a reference for a new SharePoint environment we were setting up. It was my job to plan, install, and configure a new SharePoint 2010 environment, across multiple servers for a medium size department. There is a lot to like about this book, and at 1,149 pages in length, this volume covers a lot of topics. If you are looking for a single comprehensive book on SharePoint 2010 administration, this book is a good choice.

I found the chapters on Search, Administering Enterprise Content Management, and Administering Web Content Management particularly useful. There is plenty of explanation and detail in these chapters to actually create something based on these examples in your own environment. I also liked the Real World examples provided in many sections of the book. These Real World examples are like best practices from people who have done this before. I would have liked to see more of these best practices throughout the book.

This book is clearly geared toward the SharePoint Administrator, as the name implies. There are chapters and sections on Office integration, InfoPath form, Visual Studio and workflows. But these topics are not covered in enough detail to learn these additional programs and development tools.

One small thing I did not like about this book was the weight of the pages. The pages are very thin, and as I like to mark up my book with highlights and notes, I found that the pages easily bleed through and sometimes smudge. The thinness of the pages is probably related to the size of the book.

While I do not think you can have only one reference for SharePoint Administration, given the breadth of this product, if I only could choose one book, it would be this one.

This SharePoint book is pretty much aimed at the enterprise version of SharePoint. There are mentions of SharePoint Foundation but not a lot. There is obviously a lot of stuff in common as this is SharePoint but most of the specifics focus on the enterprise features.

There are certainly parts of the book were it goes into depth on topics but the major seemed to be more an overview than a deep dive. That certainly provided insight into the features of the different components yet it didn't quite show you how to get it running in a practical situation. Given the recent release of Windows Phone 7 the chapter on integration with Windows Phone 6.5 now seems a little dated. It would nice to see some focus being put on integration with non Microsoft platforms like Android and iOS, even if via third party apps.

This is certainly a book worthwhile having and would recommend it to those with intermediate skills in SharePoint and those looking to become more skilled with SharePoint server. I however feel it lacks a little of the depth I would have expected for an 'Administrator's companion'.

In summary, a worthwhile addition to your SharePoint library but if you are looking for real deep dive Administration material this is probably not the book for you.

I read this on the flight from San Francisco to Sydney and enjoyed it. HOWEVER, Ben is weak in the areas I wanted to learn more about. The normal admin stuff is very detailed and well written, but the information topology, services, profile imports - all MUCH too thin.

A great effort, but needs these areas expanded to be truly useful to a Sharepoint Admin diving into 2010.

It goes without saying that SharePoint is becoming increasingly important as a hub for many Microsoft technologies, including Business Intelligence, enterprise search, content collaboration, and sharing. Not too far from now, there will be two types of Microsoft technologists: those that know SharePoint and those that will soon know it.

A few years ago, when I got serious about SharePoint, I learned it from Bill's Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Administrator's Companion book, which I still keep on my bookshelf. The new release, Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Administrator's Companion, doesn't disappoint either. One can appreciate the effort that went into it just judging by its sheer size (more than 1,000 pages). The book is an excellent reference material written by renowned experts and Microsoft MVPs. Readers new to SharePoint will find plenty of step-by-step instructions to help them navigate safely through the plethora of SharePoint features and capabilities.

Do you work with SharePoint? Then you have to have this book in your library. Next to TechNet this is the source on nearly all aspects of SharePoint 2010.