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.

This book provides a great overview of most of the features and functionality you will need to implement a portal solution using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. It not only discusses the features of SharePoint but it provides great tips and techniques on issues like planning, migrating, creating and governing your portal solution. In addition, it has some good how to sections which walks the reader through the implementation of certain features of the product.

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.

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.