Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft Sharepoint 2003 in 10 Minutes

What the heck is Sharepoint? We bought this book to help us find out. I've liked many of the SAMS 24-hour and 21-day books, but this is the first 10-minute SAMS that I enjoyed. This book has a 2005 copyright and addresses Sharepoint 2003, the release prceding the current Sharepoint 2007. Since the book is an introduction, it serves well even if you envision a Sharepoint 2007 environment. As we reengineered our IT resources at our small technology company to run on Microsoft Small Business Server, we almost discarded the built-in Sharepoint-based CompanyWeb intranet. Just in time, we (I and one other experienced administrator/developer) took a closer look by rapidly exploring CompanyWeb using the twenty-five, ten-minute lessons in this book. Wow, we realized we could do so much with Sharepoint to improve our intranet. We quickly invested in four thicker Sharepoint books, but this is the book we will give to end users who are looking for something beyond read-only access to the documents and lists. We learned that Sharepoint quite simply is a Microsoft server technology with an impressive set of tools for creating, viewing, and editing intranets. (Call them "portals" if they are comprehensive and well designed.) Sharepoint works just fine too for public web sites but so far has been promoted by Microsoft largely as a way to share Office 2003 and Office 2007 documents. Use of Sharepoint encourages and almost ensures best practices for not just sharing but also collaborating on documents, lists (including contacts), discussions, surveys, links, and many more intranet elements. A wide variety of templates are available from Microsoft and others. Each of these intranet elements is a Sharepoint Web Part. Web Parts are enhanced ASP.Net pages with integrated assemblies of controls. The assemblies have properties and methods that permit easy runtime modification of content, format, and views by end users - in almost the same manner as end users can edit, format, and view Word or Excel documents. Most Sharepoint documents and other items can be automatically maintained in SQL Server databases (with version control and checkout if you need them) so you can say goodbye to huge assortments of poorly organized folders that are typically found in intranets, and this improvement in content management greatly eases an intranet administrator's burden. Of course developers can build their own web parts using the sophistication of Visual Studio and all the power of the .NET Framework.

Prior to reading this book, I know nothing about Sharepoint. After reading this book, I felt comfortable and well equipped to administer Sharepoint. It is simple to read and is also thorough in covering all of the components of a Sharepoint site. This book also covered the various tasks of a Sharepoint site administrator which I found to be valuable. A great learning tool for the novice and a great reference tool for the experienced Sharepoint site administrator. I also recommend the "Microsoft Sharepoint 2003 Unleashed, 2nd Edition" book by the same authors.

After a long search I finally found the perfect SharePoint reference book for the layman, not the techie... I distributed this book to my team at work and everyone is impressed with it.

What I liked best about this book was that it is one of the few that is written by authors who seem to understand the business benefit of implementing SharePoint, not just technical details. This small book delivers on its promises. The authors and editors are to be highly commended for their creation and presentation of content appropriate for the positioning of this book. If you are someone (manager, administrator, developer, user) who is looking for an overview of what SharePoint can do for your company, this is a good book for you. The book is an easy read, yet conveys enough details to allow the reader to understand concepts at a fairly high level. The book is broken down into end-user and administrator and includes some key points missing in much larger volumes.

I was tasked with getting to grips with our 100-strong company's new SharePoint information-sharing system, not as an administrator, not as a developer and not as just an end-user but as a lead contributor managing content and telling the technical architects and administrators what features we need. This book is excellent in helping me get to grips with what SharePoint offers to a company of 100 people. It avoids over-technical developer-talk but gives a clear introduction to the powerful features of document control and structures based on configurable "web-parts". It leads me through click by click in setting up and managing what I need