Microsoft® SharePoint® 2010 Administrator's Companion [Kindle Edition]

There is a reason why SharePoint 2010 is called a "Platform" and not an application. It is because SharePoint has more to it than anyone could imagine. It is the same with this book. This is the type of book I was looking for to handle the administrative side of SharePoint for SP 2010. I would imagine that if your only focus is to develop web parts, or set up web pages, that you will eventually be looking for an Administrator's book for SharePoint. This would be your book! Additionally, it is impossible to cover every aspect of this book due to its depth. We will look at some of the important concepts covered.

The authors of "Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Administrator's Companion" are: Bill English, Brian Alderman, and Mark Ferraz. It is typical nowadays for all of us to Google the name of any person whom we want to know more about. I did that for these three authors. Each of these three gentlemen has extensive and impressive knowledge and credentials. You can trust what they have to offer in this book. I now have more sources for information as a result of Googling them.

The purpose of SharePoint is collaboration and the very first chapter I found was on collaboration. Then the 2nd chapter covered SP 2010's architecture. In my opinion, these are the two most important concepts about the SP 2010 Platform. In the collaboration chapter, I found this important comment: "Some of the most notable new Web Parts released with SharePoint 2010 are, Silverlight viewer, Media Web Part, Chart Web Part, HTML for Web part, iView Web Part, and Search Web Parts." Can anyone deny the huge increase in development capabilities with SharePoint, You already have the ability to create web sites through SharePoint; however, you now have more options on how and where you will make those modifications which will make yours or your client's sites more interesting and appealing.

A good note for administrators trying to find their way around in SharePoint 2010: "When you are evaluating SharePoint 2010 or performing testing/development activities, a small farm deployment should be sufficient. In fact, you may elect to go with a single server farm configuration for development or configuration testing. Often a developer will elect to use a virtual machine for testing because it's less expensive and can be brought up and down as needed." We had a presentation on how to do this in one of our recent Inland Empire SharePoint User Group meetings. See Chapter 2, Page 83.

Chapter 3 covers optimizing SQL Server 2008 R2 for SharePoint 2010. Chapter 4 covers how to prepare for the SharePoint 2010 installation.

Chapter 22 covers how to upgrade to SP 2010. This is THE chapter to review before you do an upgrade. The steps you must take for a successful upgrade are all spelled out. Chapter 23, Creating and Managing Workflows is a hot topic. Every time I speak to a recruiter about SharePoint, the first two items up for discussion are upgrading and workflows. These are another set of chapters any worthy SharePoint Administrator must know.

Lest this review grow too large, I will stop here and finish with the statement that the basics are all covered from an Administrator's viewpoint, covering the preliminary subjects leading up to the installation upgrading, securing your sites and data, and modifications to the sites, web parts, SQL Server optimization, lists, and so on. No review can do justice to this extensive book, but you can be assured that if you have questions, a majority of them will be answered from this book's content, as it is rich in administrative content for SharePoint 2010. This really is THE book to get.

I am currently in the middle of a very large SharePoint 2007 to 2010 upgrade. I have purchased several books to help me get the job done, and this one is the only one that has really helped.

This book really covers everything on the administration side of SharePoint 2010 in great detail. You can tell the team that wrote it knows the guts of SharePoint 2010. It really is all inclusive. I have not gone to this book looking for answer that I could not find yet.

The CD that comes with the book has the ebook version of the book. They included an XPS version, but it will not open. It says it is corrupt. The XPS version being corrupt doesn't really matter, the PDF version works for finding all the references to a topic quickly.

The CD also includes a 526 page MICROSOFT SHAREPOINT FOUNDATION 2010 CMDLET REFERENCE that really helps find out the details of all the PowerShell commands you can now use with SharePoint.

If you are an Admin for a SharePoint 2010 farm you MUST, I mean MUST, have this book by your side.

Bill English (and company) delivers quality yet again. I've been fortunate and heard Bill present on SharePoint several times. His knowledge and real-world experience is accurate and helpful. I seek out his presentations and books and they are always top-notch.
SharePoint best practices are a difficult thing to define. This book not only provides you with the "how" to perform SP administration; it gives you background on why you have these admin choices in the first place. It does such a good job with the "why" that I am finding a lot of helpful information for use in a document management application I support.

The book begins with a quick overview of what's new in SharePoint and how to use it from an end-user point of view. You can't be a SP administrator (or developer) if you don't have some idea how the end-user will use the product. This chapter gives you a very quick overview (saves you from reading an entire end-user book to gain perspective).

Chapter 2 provides a great overview of SP architecture. I'm not an IT Pro but I need to know enough to ask for (and justify) the servers and databases needed. This chapter gave me enough for this plus an understanding to prepare me to select the right choices during the SP installation.

You repeatedly hear that a SharePoint governance plan is a must. There are many templates to begin from. But it is difficult to determine what should be in YOUR governance plan and how you can convince the organization that creation and adherence to the governance plan is a must for the successful rollout of SharePoint. Chapter 9 - Organizing Information provides both. This chapter takes the huge topic of information architecture and provides background and steps to guide you through creating an architecture. I particularly liked Problem to solution to requirements to governance discussion. This results in each governance item linked back to a requirement (and problem). This will give me what I need to obtain governance buy in. This chapter gives credibility to governance.

There are many chapters you would expect to see in an Admin Companion (Central Admin, PowerShell, etc). These chapters are equally well done providing both the "how" and "why" for administration choices in SharePoint.