Title : Essential SharePoint 2007 – Delivering High-Impact Collaboration

Authors : Scott Jamison, Mauro Cardarelli, Susan Hanley

Summary :
Deploying SharePoint and leaving it to the users and not monitoring it is the best way for failure. This is known and true also for non-SharePoint projects. But what really lacks with SharePoint is how to demonstrate the management what could bring SharePoint in an organization and how to improve the SharePoint infrastructure during its life. In other words, when deploying SharePoint, governance is one of the important keys to success.
This books not only describes the SharePoint functionalities but also gives some guidance to better know your organization and how to solve its collaboration problems and is the first SharePoint book I read that is talking about “information architecture”. It describes the different 2003 to 2007 migration options, what are the possible backup, restore and disaster recovery scenarios. Then it goes through Records Management, workflows, Search and finally Business Intelligence, providing plenty of step-by-step examples and screenshots

Onthe other side, I had the chance to attend the SharePoint Conference 2009 in Las Vegas session of Scott and Susan that was very interesting and a source of inspiration to make a SharePoint deployment a success not only from a provider point of view, but also a success for the users.

Review :
This book is not for developer or technical people, but more for people that need to sell SharePoint as a collaboration platform. For me, it is not for end-users as well. We can feel that the book is not relying only on the functional expertise of SharePoint but also on the way information workers are working with IT and their habits. Excellent examples can be taken to put in front the business value or the benefits of the platform. Finally, I think this book is a good starter for talking about SharePoint governance.