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.
