Customer Reviews

Professional SharePoint 2007 Records Management Development: Managing Official Records with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (Wrox Programmer to Programmer)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Before getting started, I should disclose that John is a friend of mine and that I got a free copy of this book from Wrox. Neither of those come to bear on this review as I wouldn't insult John by not telling the truth, and I don't particularly care whether Wrox likes my review or not... :-)

That said, this is a book that belongs on the shelf of every SharePoint developer - not because you might need to know about Records Management in SharePoint, although if you are doing RM then this is a given; but because of the overall approach that John takes to development. Like everything else I've ever read by John, and any conversations we've had about development, this book exudes good architectural practice. If you get nothing else out of this book, having a little bit of that rub off on you would make you a better SharePoint developer.

Enough of that...on to the book. As I said, if you are doing RM in SharePoint, buying this book is a no-brainer. Just do it.

I honestly don't do much RM so much of the book was beyond me. However, I read it and understand the basic principles far better than I did before. If I ever need to go deep into RM, I know what my first step in coming up to speed will be - re-reading and fully grokking this book.

If you're not doing RM, let's take a look at just a few of the things John covers that are likely still applicable to what you are doing:
1. Creating and manipulating Content Types
2. Creating DocLibs
3. Creating and versioing documents
4. CAML
5. Creating and manipulating fields/site columns
6. Setting and managing Permissions
7. Information policies
8. Workflow, including custom activities / actions

There is more, but that gives you a good idea of the type of non-RM topics covered.

No book is perfect, this one included. Here are a few things I would like to have seen better covered:
1. Coverage of non-US compliance regulations - more than just the passing mention on page 20. I understand why this was done this way, but a few high level paragraphs would have been nice

2. A short (2-3 page) "Dummies Guide to RM". All of the information is in the book somewhere, but it is scattered across a few chapters. Something right up front to level-set and get everyone on the same page would have been nice. I get the feeling that we moved right down to the trees without first understanding the forest. There were a number of points in the book where I needed to step back and figure out where some of the details presented fit into the big picture and there was no ONE place to go to get that big picture view.

All in all, I recommend this book. If you're doing RM, this book has been out for a few months - why haven't you bought it already? If you're not doing RM, this is still a good book that you should read. You will learn some things that will make you a better SharePoint developer.

-- Dave

PS: The only reason that I gave this 4 stars instead of 5 is that I don't do much RM...

[DISCLAIMER] - I was a technical editor on this book.

This is an incredible book for not only the SharePoint ECM developer but is a must have for developers utilizing SharePoint as a platform to build enterprise applications. For those new to ECM and the concepts of records management the first chapter does a good job of explaining content modeling and gets you thinking about the full life-cycle of that content. The rest of the book examines SharePoint's ECM features including the Records Center and Information Policies (to name a few) and how these features can be extended to accommodate specific business requirements. This is important material since the extensibility of these features are either not well documented or can be complicated to understand without good examples.

In addition to the excellent material, the code examples in this book are one of the reasons I think this book stands out. Unlike a lot of technical books the examples and code framework John uses teach the concepts of the API, but also teach good architectural practices. I found myself not only thinking about how SharePoint could handle my own specific requirements, but how I would architect my solution. Simply awesome!