A great company portal transforms the way you work.

It can empower communication, encourage collaboration, and bring everyone a bit closer. Choosing SharePoint as the platform for that portal is a good start, especially with the advent of Office 365 and its huge, integrated set of available tools. SharePoint is such a feature-rich and powerful tool, however, that it can be confusing and difficult.

A tool should make a job faster, easier, or better. How can SharePoint be used to build an intranet, a portal, that supports better communication and collaboration in your organization? How can you get good—or GREAT!—results?

I believe the best strategy for success is mastery of the basics. My dad was a jack-of-all-trades with a grade 6 education and limited resources. In the 1970’s he decided to move his young family off the grid. He bought a used fishing scow and with little experience and less money, built a floating home. He accomplished this with some help from friends and family, and by mastery of basic tools.

This book describes and demonstrates practical techniques to get good results with the basic SharePoint toolset.

You will apply tested methods, templates, and examples to build your portal. This book will you save money and time as you create a portal that works. If you know your tools, use templates, and involve users, you can get good, fast, and inexpensive results.

Building a SharePoint portal is like building that float house. We have a foundation—a platform—to start with, and a collection of tools and materials to build what’s needed. With SharePoint we have lists, libraries, wiki pages, and permissions structures that we can pull out-of-the-box.

And, like my dad did with the float house, you will involve your users in the vision and design such that they feel a sense of ownership and are eager to use the result.

In this book, core concepts are explained through description and anecdotes. And in the full (paid) version, the companion Office 365 site provides real examples and downloadable templates for you to copy and use as you wish.

Please let me know what you think of this book; it and the results it may achieve are a collaboration between myself, my clients, and you.

The SharePoint in Practice Philosophy is TIKI

TEMPLATES

We use and reuse standard templates. By reusing prewritten documents and tested processes we can save time and, even more importantly, improve the quality of our results. Much of this book, and all of the templates included on the website, are copied from actual projects and refined over time. To use that old saw: No need to reinvent the wheel.

INVOLVEMENT

We engage and involve end-users and decision makers throughout the project. By engaging a broad spectrum of people, you get better results and much better buy-in to your new portal.

KISS “Keep it Simple SharePoint”

We use basic, out-of-the-box SharePoint as much as possible. There are a lot of fancy things that can be done in portal development, and they often bring value, but at what cost? We believe and promote that the simplest solution is usually the best, especially in the first release.

ITERATIONS

We approach our work iteratively. Start rough and collaborate with others to refine over time. This way stakeholders see results faster and can influence development more effectively. And by presenting a work in progress and asking users to help refine it, they feel more like inventors and less like observers.

Buy SharePoint in Practice
BASIC VERSION

ISBN: 978-1-9995132-1-4

Buy SharePoint in Practice
Enhanced version including Portal Build Toolkit

ISBN: 978-1-9995132-0-7

SharePoint in Practice Online Resources »

Amazon Paperback Kindle Ebook Enhanced Ebook Basic Ebook (without Portal Build Toolkit) SharePoint Consulting Services SharePoint in Practice PLATINUM PACKAGE Office 365 Collaboration Kickstart SharePoint in Practice GOLD PACKAGE Audiobook (coming soon)