A Practical Guide to SharePoint 2013

Click book image above to go to Amazon.com book page!

My new book "A Practical Guide to SharePoint 2013" is now available on Amazon. 

I am happy to share this news with my blog readers. I hope you will find the information presented in the book useful. I have tried the keep it simple yet it contains elaborate information on topics that I am sure will interest you. Since SharePoint has been on the market for a long time, it has become part of almost every office. Number of end users has grown tremendously over the past few years. Writing a book for the whole community is not an easy job therefore I have included content that will be of interest to everyone. There are chapters for administrators, especially the initial chapters are about installing and configuring SharePoint. If you are an end user of course you don't worry about infrastructure, or users, or other related issues. You can install SharePoint on a single machine and play with the features but in real world scenario, installing and maintaining SharePoint installations is not easy. There is lot of planning involved. You have to make all parts of the infrastructure work, for example, users are stored in Active Directory, site URLs are configured in Active Directory Domain Name services, sites are hosted in IIS, content is saved in SQL Server, and so on. If you cannot configure Active Directory, how will you make SharePoint work in your organization! If you don't know how to setup permissions in SQL Server, several SharePoint features will not work unless you setup correct permissions in SQL (For example, for FBA, Extranet, BCS, etc).

Out of the box Search is easy to use but in real world scenario, you will be tasked with setting up custom search therefore it is important that you learn how to setup and configure search in SharePoint 2013.

Microsoft has been working hard in promoting their cloud solutions recently. You may have heard about Office 365, SharePoint Online, etc but have you used SharePoint Online before! Would you like to setup a public facing website in the cloud? Would you like to have this public facing website a unique blend of style and professionalism (which in technical terms is called branding)? This book has it all. I am not trying to boast about the book and the content that it has but telling you what it contains and what not may help you in deciding whether you need this book on your desk or not. Here are some of the topics discussed in the book:

SharePoint Deployments - Configure Active Directory, SQL Server, IIS Roles!
SharePoint Cloud - Setup SharePoint in the cloud
Office 365 Development – Create your first SharePoint app in the cloud
SharePoint Modern Apps - Modern, state of the art applications using HTML5 and SharePoint 2013
Extranets
Business Processes - Leverage Business Connectivity Services to build Line of Business applications
Web Parts Development – Understand and learn to develop web parts
Electronic Forms - Learn to program web-enabled electronic forms using InfoPath
Public Websites - Design a branded public website using SharePoint Online/Office 365
SharePoint 2013 Search – Learn Search configuration, customization, Managed Metadata
SharePoint 2013 Branding – Learn how to brand sites to look elegant, classy and professional

 It is just my humble attempt to contribute something meaningful to the SharePoint community. I have been doing this since 2006. I have written hundreds of articles on SharePoint, several books and ebooks and I do all this because I love SharePoint and I love SharePoint community and for this very reason that this community has given so much to me, I have dedicated this book to the SharePoint community. I hope you will benefit from it in one way or the other.

Sample chapters are available on the book's website:

http://practicalguidetosharepoint.com

You can also download code for the book chapters from the website.