UK Access User Group National Seminar – Working with Access 2007 and SharePoint

I’m going to be speaking at the UK Access User Group National Seminar at Microsoft’s offices in Thames Valley Park Reading on 16th November, on the topic of “Working with Access 2007 and SharePoint”.  I’m beginning to see quite a few SharePoint applications being put together which in the past might have ended up as Access applications.  There are some important caveats though, as I will hopefully illustrate during my talk.

There’s a fair range of topics on offer, and some good speakers, including Martin Parry from Microsoft on Office development with Visual Studio 2008, and Alan Cossey on his Access 2007 developer experiences.

The full agenda can be seen here, and online registration is available here.

Technorati tags: Access, SharePoint, Access 2007

New MS Whitepaper on SharePoint Data Protection and Recovery

Available as a download from this link.  Worth a read by anyone implementing Office SharePoint Server 2007.

Technorati tags: sharepoint 2007, backup

End User SharePoint

I came across a nice site from Mark Miller the other day, called End User SharePoint.  Mark is based in New York City, and his motto is “No GeekSpeak on SharePoint 2007″. 

The site content includes lots of useful little screencasts on creating a SharePoint Document Management Center.  Mark’s articles are worth reading as well.    I particularly liked the one on Learning SharePoint 2007 – Incremental Steps.

Technorati tags: sharepoint 2007, end user, training

SharePoint Books – My Recommendations

I’ve spent more time working with clients on SharePoint implementations (MOSS and WSS) than any other technology over the past 6 months.  Quite often I’m getting asked to recommend books on SharePoint technologies, either for “getting up to speed”, administration, or development.  I’ve looked at quite a few different titles over that time, so I thought I would put together a quick summary of the ones worth buying or avoiding:

Office SharePoint 2007 Administrator’s Companion : essential if you are planning to install, administer or maintain a SharePoint 2007 installation.

Essential SharePoint 2007 by Scott Jamison, Mauro Cardarelli and Susan Hanley : This is a very good overview if you want to know where SharePoint might fit in to your company/organisational environment.  Also very useful stuff if you are looking at overview material to present to management to sell the idea of a SharePoint solution to them.  Note this is NOT a technical/teach yourself SharePoint book.

Beginning SharePoint 2007 by Amanda Murphy and Shane Perran : Lots of good practical information here if you want to learn about SharePoint 2007 functionality, with many ”Try it out” exercises.   

SharePoint 2007 User’s Guide by Seth Bates and Tony Smith : Like the Murphy/Perran book, a good “how to” reference for users.  You could use both these books to help you create training material for your users.

Real World SharePoint 2007 by loads of different SharePoint MVPs : good chapters on workflow, customising/branding and the business data catalog. 

Professional SharePoint 2007 Development by another set of SharePoint professionals (Wrox books have lots of authors) : good book if you want to take a look at SharePoint development with Visual Studio.   Again, lots of downloadable samples.

And here is one I wasn’t really impressed with:

Beginning SharePoint 2007 Administration by Goran Husman : I didn’t get on with this book.  I wanted something I could recommend to customers which would take them through installation and admin, but to me it seems very disjointed, and difficult to find what you need (very poor index).  Also some of the command-line examples seem to contain typos, not good if you are trying to get stsadm.exe to work.

By the way, if you are looking for ways to deliver end-user training you might also want to look at the new SharePoint Learning Kit which Microsoft are making available through Connect.  You can read more about this here and see what Ian Morrish has done with it here .

Technorati tags: SharePoint books, training