Will Kelly

Part of my 2012 learning plan is to build up my SharePoint 2010 skills. It’s a popular platform in my local employment marketplace. I’ve worked with it a lot in the past with a lot of OJT learning. Besides, I am a believer in SharePoint and hope to see it play a part of my near to mid-term professional future. I purchased the MOS 2010 Study Guide for Microsoft Office SharePoint by Geoff Evelyn from iTunes Bookstore to get the SharePoint fun started.

Using Office 365, I went to work through the exercises in the book using SharePoint Online to help sharpen my skills and learn some features like tuning the site search. While I know this book is written as a study guide for the SharePoint MOS, I am disappointed to see only a bare minimum of coverage on planning a SharePoint site. In my travels, I’ve seen multiple SharePoint implementations suffer from lack of planning and the planning issues drifted across all levels of the project including the stakeholders who were to manage the sites.

The tagging and note content in section 3.3 caught my interest the most since the bulk of my SharePoint experience is managing team sites in SharePoint 2007.Tagging of SharePoint content if implemented correctly could help quell the inevitable ‘Where is that document in SharePoint?” type questions that arise from SharePoint newbies and site visitors already cynical towards SharePoint after being burned by a poor implementation of SharePoint in the past.

I wasn’t able to test out the MySites content in Office 365 but the section was well written and paced. In fact, seeing the options MySites in SharePoint 2010 brings to the table I think it is time I setup an instance of SharePoint 2010 in a VM on one of my home office PCs to see it up close and personal.

This is definitely a book I would recommend to people seeking to upgrade their SharePoint 2010 skills even if they don’t plan on taking the MOS exam.

I went the iBooks route for purchasing this book because I am continuing a resolution from 2011 to buy as few print books as possible. The reading experience in iBooks is enjoyable especially the highlighter, bookmarks, and notes tools. I also like the fact that the books are searchable and the iPad lays flat when I am working through exercises on my PC.

Have you read the MOS 2010 Study Guide for Microsoft Office SharePoint?