Do not under estimate the amount of up front planning you need to deploy sharepoint. I have not found many resources that adequately guide you through the process. Every installation is different and the standard Microsoft material is to generic to be useful.

This book describes the pitfalls and suggests real life scenarios in which to help better guide you. This book you will give Architects and Designers a good grounding in how the technology should be used and some of its pit falls. It is NOT a step by step how to install Sharepoint guise. In fact I do not think there is one of those even though we would all love to have one.

Best Practices is an excellent reference material while planning deployment, be it a new farm, search etc. Fantastic book. Use it often for a lot of things.

This book is an essential part of any MOSS professional's toolbox. You will read and re-read this book several times. There is currently nothing like it in the field. It doesn't give hard core answers to your MOSS questions, but will give you plenty to consider in your MOSS projects. I am continually amazed at how much there is to learn about MOSS and this book is a wealth of knowledge.

My own Sharepoint 2007 book came out recently and so I have been constantly checking the Amazon US "hit parade" to see how it's been doing.

Well it's doing OK, but the book which at the moment seems to be selling in vast quantities is this MOSS 2007 Best Practices book.

Now I'll admit that before I got a copy for myself I was hard put to understand why. After all this was a book by the two people (Bill English and Ben Curry) who had (organised or) written the two existing Sharepoint Administrator Books from Microsoft Press - the massive (and, through the many authors, slightly unbalanced) Administrator's Companion and the small, but full of quality information "Administrator's Pocket Consultant - so what else could there be in this one ?

Actually there's a lot because this is probably a completely different book to any of the - by now almost 100 - SharePoint 2007 books that have gone before.

It's probably the first one that you can **and should** read without having a computer handy.

The book doesn't concentrate on teaching you how to do things - which is naturally what most of the other books do - but instead concentrates on making you THINK. Think, that is, about your options BEFORE you do things.

The other thing I've noticed is that it's the kind of book where you can dive into a topic that's maybe only a part of a section of a chapter and read just that and you will have learned something useful.

My favorite example of that is the few pages in the Document Management chapter that discuss whether or not you should use SharePoint (document libraries) as a replace for a File Server system. First there's the single line with the answer (No) but that's followed by some indication of what could be moved and what not and why. These are inter-spaced with several in-boxes containing examples from the real-world - one of which to my delight (and this IS a Microsoft Press book) actually suggested that in certain circumstances you should keep your non-Microsoft application and NOT move to SharePoint 2007!

In fact the only thing I found to object to in that section of the text was the fact that whereas "SharePoint Server" had been given its "2007" to complete the product name (unnecessary - there isn't any other "SharePoint Server"), Windows SharePoint Services had been left without it's (essential) "3.0". This comment, however, is rather like the car tests of old where the car was highly praised in all essential details but for balance it was mentioned that the ash tray was badly located!

The only other aspect I have a problem with is that it is 800 pages thick. As it's the kind of book that in my opinion you should carry around with you and just read bits of in odd moments, it's a pity that it's not thinner and lighter and is instead the size and weight of book that is more suited to being permanently located on the desk next to the computer.

Microsoft Press France actually did make two volumes out of the 1000 page Administrator's Companion when they created the French language translation of that, so it's possible and it's a pity to my mind that Microsoft Press US didn't make two volumes out of this. It would need those two 400 page volumes because there is good stuff throughout, but to my mind this book cries out to be as easy to carry around as the Pocket Consultant is and it isn't.

Maybe they are planning a Kindle version. That would at least help US readers take this "book" with them everywhere.

When deploying SharePoint, it is critical to plan for not only what you need now, but for how it will grow and scale down the road, especially when Document Management is involved. If you don't plan adequately for searchability, scalability, or disaster recovery, you can easily run into problems.

One criticism I have had of many SharePoint books is that they are written from a technical perspective and explain how to install and configure SharePoint, but they gloss over the critical planning stages or the best practices for scalability.

As the name of this book indicates, this is a very thorough guide covering the best practices for planning, deploying, optimizing, and organizing SharePoint. This book is not necessarily intended to give you step-by-step instructions for installing SharePoint, but rather cover the full lifecycle of a SharePoint deployment and give you best practice recommendations. The layout and organization of the book is very logical, making it easy to quickly find what you are looking for. It covers both Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and MOSS 2007. It is written to be accessible by anyone on a team evaluating or implementing SharePoint, or anyone who just wants to learn more about it.

The book is broken into the following sections:

Introduction--includes an overview of the various SharePoint Technologies, how to determine which you need, and how SharePoint will help your business.

Part I--Planning--This is not just about planning for the IT infrastructure, but more about planning for the impact that SharePoint will have on your organization, such as dealing with push-back from users after moving away from shared folders to SharePoint document libraries and breaking down departmental "information kingdoms."

Part II--Building--This section gets into best practices for building your environment, including content management strategies, the role of custom development, and dev and test environments, including replication of content between environments.

Part III--Deploying--This section has a great discussion about organizing your content and search/crawling strategy to optimize searchability for your content, security of content, business intelligence, and intranet/extranet/internet deployment scenarios.

Part IV--Operating--This section has great tips on availability, disaster recovery, capacity planning, and performance monitoring.

What I appreciated most about this book is it is very readable and does not include a lot of "fluff," just straightforward best practices. For example, in Chapter 8, the section on should SharePoint replace file servers is very straightforward about the limitation of SharePoint and when file servers should still be used.

If you are someone new to SharePoint or a System Administrator charged with deploying SharePoint, this book may leave you wanting more--it is not designed to be a how-to book; however, it does include many good recommendations for additional resources.