Miller - SharePoint 2010 at Work

My official title in the SharePoint Community is Mark Miller, Senior Storyteller . As such, I like to think of the articles provided to EndUserSharePoint (EUSP) as stories, not blog posts. We publish content each day, as opposed to posting content. Theres a subtle distinction. Publishing insinuates something more than a simple thought dashed off and posted in a matter of minutes. To publish means the item is meant to be read as a thoughtful narrative. It is implied that there is an idea behind the content that will be useful at multiple levels. When we publish an article on EUSP, we think of it as a story that will resonate with the SharePoint End User. Underlying the process is the premise that a story will engage readers by putting them into the narrative as participants, not as passive observers.

Each of the authors in this collection was selected because of his or her ability to tell a good story. They take the technical aspects of the narrative and weave a tale around the daily life of a SharePoint Site Administrator or the constant struggles and frustrations of a typical End User. Each author has his or her own voice and perspective, but the stories are tied together with a consistent theme: SharePoint is flexible enough to help solve real-world business problems, if you can determine the right part of the elephant to examine.

This book will be most effective for those who are looking to solve business problems through the use of SharePoint but dont know which end of the elephant to tackle. For those who have never encountered an elephant, or SharePoint, the stories here might not be very helpful. Those who will benefit the most are those who have worked with SharePoint for a while and need to know which end of the beast to examine for the specific problem they are trying to solve. For them, the stories will become the catalyst for further investigation and discovery.

The stories in this collection were chosen because of their popularity on EndUserSharePoint. Like a blind man describing an elephant, each tale takes a different view of the platform and shows how you can use SharePoint to solve real-world business problems. The solutions and concepts have been viewed hundreds of thousands of times on the EndUserSharePoint site. The authors have used the feedback on those articles to refine their ideas, making them useful for the broadest spectrum of the SharePoint Community. The technical aspects of each of the stories have been updated to the SharePoint 2010 environment, but the concepts remain timeless and can be applied to any version of SharePoint 2007 or 2010.

The stories can be read in any order, but I suggest that everyone at least review just to get an idea of where your SharePoint implementation sits on the maturity scale. From there, glance through the rest of the stories and see what youd like to tackle first.