The SharePoint Shepherd's Guide for End Users

Most people are forced to take a class when they want to start using SharePoint. Thankfully Rob has put out this book filled with TONS of common end-user tasks spelled out in a step-by-step process that's easy to follow. This is a must book for anyone who's new to SharePoint and wants to leverage it to its full out-of-the-box potential!

Rob Bogue has a great reputation in the SharePoint community. He is an MVP & I read everything from him I can get my hands on. I had high expectations when I learned he had published "The SharePoint Shepherd's Guide for End Users". My expectations were exceeded. The Shepherd's Guide is unique. There's nothing like it anywhere. In a world where the ability to fog a mirror & spell "SharePoint" can land a consulting job, the expertise contained in this book is unmatched anywhere & is exceedingly valuable. The Shepherd's Guide is a brilliant concept, with lucid, step-by-step instructions for simple & complex tasks, much clearer than the SharePoint out-of-the-can help. Who needs to scour through pages full of hits on Live Search or Google with a reference such as this at one's fingertips? It's an excellent resource for novice & expert alike. I've just learned that electronic & enterprise editions are available & I'm eager to learn more. In the meantime, I carry Rob Bogue's The Shepherd's Guide with me to all my SharePoint engagements & recommend it to all my customers. If you use SharePoint, I recommend it to you, too. Jimmy May Microsoft Sr. Performance Consultant: SQL Server SQL Server Pros, Founder & Visionary-in-Chief Indianapolis Professional Association for SQL Server, Founder & Executive Committee

This book is a great resource for any company who is deploying SharePoint and needs a good way to provide a self help resource for their users. It is critically important to the successful adoption of a platform like SharePoint to have a user community that is functional. This book helps them be that and more.

For me, this book is like the end user manual that Microsoft never shipped with SharePoint but really should have. Rob does a great job of identifying the core functions of SharePoint that users need to know, and covers them as easily understood common tasks. I think this is a great way to introduce information workers to SharePoint, as a user my goal is to figure out how to accomplish what I need to do with a new tool not the intimate inner workings of the tool. By distilling SharePoint's core collaborative functions into chunks that users can easily grasp, the book makes it much easier for a new user to get up and going with the platform. Each task is clearly laid out with a descriptive purpose, so a user can identify whether or not the task described by the book is applicable to what they are trying to accomplish in SharePoint. Rob then walks through the steps necessary to execute the task from start to finish, and includes very useful screenshots to guide readers through the SharePoint pages they should be seeing in their environment as they complete the task. The book also does a good job of explaining why the task is being executed in a particular way and covering any limitations or gotchas that the reader may encounter. The book covers a wide range of topics, including basics like using a SharePoint collaboration site and integrating with Outlook and the rest of the Office stack. Rob also goes into some Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007-specific topics such as MySites and publishing sites. One thing I would have liked to see Rob spend a little more time on is the difference between MOSS and Windows SharePoint Services (WSS); he does mention it briefly in the initial chapters of the book but when covering MOSS-specific tasks I would have liked to see him pointing out that features like MySites require MOSS and are not included in all versions of SharePoint. But I know from personal experience that this is not an easy topic to cover briefly and understand why he took the approach he did with WSS versus MOSS in the book. The Shepherd's Guide also includes some outstanding resources in its appendices. The appendices cover Site Definitions, List Definitions, Web Parts, Views, and Permissions, and provide excellent descriptions of each SharePoint component within those groupings so that users can get a good understanding of what makes them unique as well as their common use cases. I think it makes a lot of sense to include these in appendices, rather than trying to explain the components within the book's tasks. This way readers are not getting overwhelmed by all the information and have an easy resource to flip to when they need it. And I really like seeing everything covered so thoroughly, because these components are key elements to successfully using SharePoint to its fullest potential.