RTM of my first SharePoint book

We’re days away from the general availability of my 4th book, but the first I’ve done around SharePoint technology. Funny that my 3rd book on Rational Software technology was published a couple months into my start as a Microsoft employee in 2006, and it has taken me this long to work on another book. Why so long? For those who know my exploits, I publish 4-6 articles a week across various sites. So writing a book on SharePoint should have been a no-brainer, right? Something odd happens when a book proposal has been accepted, and a project plan agreed to by its authors – your workload quadruples, and all of it the highest urgency.

Thankfully I embarked on this project with some friends from the community who were supportive and easy to work with. The entire project was spearheaded by Jennifer Mason, who brought together myself, Wes Preston, and Brian Jackett. The idea was fairly simple: create a book that walked through, step-by-step, a number of no-code solutions that anyone could build to help them more quickly get value out of the platform. Each chapter follows the same template, walking you through the business analyst perspective to help you understand the scope and scale of what you are trying to build, and to help you involve all those who should have a voice in the process. The book also points out differences in SharePoint 2010 versions, so you know what is possible in Foundation vs Standard vs Enterprise vs Office365.

Here are the solutions we covered:

Chapter 1: Building a Project Management Solution

Chapter 2: Building a Training Registration Management System

Chapter 3: Building a Basic FAQ Solution

Chapter 4: Building a Learning Center

Chapter 5: Building a Help Desk Solution

Chapter 6: Building a Remote Teams Activity Site

Chapter 7: Building a Team Blog Platform

Chapter 8: Building a RFP Response Solution

Chapter 9: Building a Contact Management Solution

Chapter 10: Building a Resource Scheduling Solution

This book really will be a desktop reference for anyone trying to learn to master SharePoint. It was written for power users – people who understand the basics of SharePoint, and have the right permission level to build some solutions.

For those interested in buying a copy now, you can order an electronic “rough cut” version here, or pre-order a copy to be shipped in mid-March.