Book Review:SharePoint for Project Management

I first heard about this book via the SharePoint for Project Management section of Bamboo Nation.  The author Dux Raymond Sy, is Bamboo Software’s resident Project Management expert, and as well as a long history of working with SharePoint he is a Certified Project Management Professional.

I’m certainly of the opinion that SharePoint is an excellent tool for Project Management, and I’m pleased to say that Dux puts this across in a very readable way, with hands-on workshops in each chapter.  The writing style is very “non-techie” which makes it an easy read for people needing to understand how this technology will help them to do a better job of managing projects.  Also it isn’t one of those mammoth 700 page technical bibles.  It comes in at a little over 200 pages and can definitely be recommended to people who need to understand what this stuff is all about and how it relates to their responsibilities.

The book has an accompanying SharePoint for Project Management website and here you will find videos, discussion threads and various downloadable templates. 

So overall I think it’s worth adding to your library and circulating to those with PM responsibilities.  There is one minor point worth noting.  The book covers various methods of integrating Microsoft Project with SharePoint sites, and mentions Project Publisher.  If you are based outside of the USA you should be aware that this product currently only supports US English in the naming of lists published up to SharePoint.  So for example it creates a list called Project Center, and if you change the title of this list to, for example Project Centre then MS Project synchronisation stops working.  I’ve been in touch with the vendors, and they have confirmed that this issue exists, although they may have international versions available in the future.

I do think though that many users of SharePoint for Project Management will need a way of synchronising MS Project with their SharePoint task or issues lists, so I would recommend taking a look at the IntelliGantt products available from TeamDirection.  Lots of well thought out functionality here from a company which seems to listen to user feedback, and integrates very nicely with the Bamboo SharePoint Project Portfolio Dashboard.

Technorati tags: sharepoint, project Management

Lightning Tools Big SharePoint Survey

Nick Swan over at Lightning tools has put together the Big SharePoint Survey, the intention being to find out more about how the product is being used, what the pain points are etc.   Results will be made available to all, so the more contributors they get the more useful the data will be.  You can complete the survey online here.

On the subject of how SharePoint is being used, interesting to see this post on 10 best-designed intranets of 2009 (2009?) where half the winning intranets used SharePoint….

Technorati tags: SharePoint, survey, intranet