Customer Reviews

Sharepoint User's Guide (Infusion Development Corp)

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

 

 

I am going to try to put this as delicately and professionally as possible. Do not waste your money. Sure it is only $10 plus shipping but it is still $10. If I could give this book a rating of lower than one star, I would.

The book is very small in size and contains about 130 pages. It claims to be for end users, but wastes almost 20% of those pages (at the end of the book) telling you how to setup SharePoint.

The barely legible examples in the book are based on the authors writing of the book. Most contain very little of substance causing me to wonder how much real world experience the authors have with SharePoint.

The help system is free and there is another end user book (which I reviewed positively) available in the same price range.

Ordinarily, a computer book starts by introducing what the topic is, in this case SharePoint. However, Chapter 1 of this book did it insufficiently. Past Chapter 2, I still did not know exactly what Sharepoint was. The authors mumbled something about collaboration, discussion, HTML pages, etc. Funnily, the last chapter covers SharePoint installation. Shouldn't be in Chapter 1 so the reader can easily follow?

I had to do my own research, and found this from Microsoft website:

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Windows SharePoint Services is a collection of services for Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003 that you can use to create team-oriented Web sites to share information and foster collaboration with other users on documents. You can also use Windows SharePoint Services as a development platform for creating collaboration and information-sharing applications.
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Which I think is more useful than chapter 1 of this book.

Microsoft's SharePoint software is currently attracting a lot of attention, so I thought it would be interesting to do some reviews of books touching on that subject. SharePoint User's Guide by Infusion Development Corporation was one of my early choices for review, and it's a book with a somewhat confusing target audience.

Contents: Working with Sites and Workspaces; Basic Web Parts; Extending Site Pages; Securing SharePoint Sites; Integrating with Office 2003; Setting Up Windows SharePoint Services; Index

This book is targeted for SharePoint users looking to do the most common tasks within the package. As such, I would think that I could theoretically give this to my end users as a guide to the software. But there's far too many references to other software packages like IIS, SQL Server 2000, etc. There's also an entire chapter on how to install SharePoint, which is really outside the capabilities (or interests) of that end user base. OK, so perhaps this is better for a technical user audience. But in my experience, that audience wants a lot of details on the guts of the software, not just a guide that says "do this, this, and this..." So if that's the case, what group *does* this book hit? I really don't know...

The information in the book isn't bad, it's just that it's difficult to determine who best would benefit from the material without an inordinate amount of inappropriate stuff thrown in...

The book assumed that the reader has some exposure to SharePoint. I liked the straight forward step by step instruction to achieve functionality in my sites. It works great as a reference tool but not so much as a learning tool. However, I did pick this book up as a complete SharePoint virgin and learned to build some sweet sites in a very short amount of time with this book as my only reference.

This was a difficult book to wade through and was not user friendly. The last several chapters were useful.