#SP25 is live now. Please join this amazing free event and increase your sharepoint knowledge

If you are not attending the live free sessions, you are really missing out. Join now using the following link

https://www.sp24conf.com

It's a 24 hours conferences online, FREE and full of useful information by professional speakers. Some really great content pouring out at the conference now.

Live Attendee Heatmap below:

SharePoint Saturday Gulf - April 12, 2014 - Don't forget to attend!

Are you attending SharePoint Saturday Gulf #spsgulf tomorrow? If you haven't registered yet, do so now! There will be three tracks, one in Arabic and two in English. Amazing speakers are presenting tomorrow. Different topics will be discussed. If you are a SharePointee, you should not miss this event. Topics range from SharePoint Search to Office 365. You can interact with the presenters and ask questions. The event is totally free. If you are attending "SharePoint Search - An Indispensable Tool", you will get a free copy of ebook called by the same name. Few lucky participants will get a hard copy of new SharePoint book "A Practical Guide to SharePoint 2013". You can attend all events if you want or pick selected topics that you are interested in. I hope you will attend the event. 

  

Practical Guide to SharePoint 2013 now on goodreads.com

My new book 'A Practical Guide to SharePoint 2013' is not available on goodreads.com. If you have already the book, please review it on goodreads.com. It's free. Your review will help others in deciding whether they want to buy this book or not. If you haven't read it yet, get a copy and read it now. Book is now available on google play, kindle and Amazon. You can buy digital copy at a nominal price. Here are the links:

GoodReads.com

PracticalGuidetoSharePoint.com

Amazon.com

Amazon Kindle

Google Play

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.

Renewed as a Microsoft SharePoint MVP for 2012!

I have been renewed as a Microsoft SharePoint Server Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for 2012! This is my 6th consecutive year as a SharePoint MVP. I would like to thank Microsoft for giving me the opportunity to serve the community that is so great. We serve the community even if we are not MVPs but being an MVP gives you that pride and motivation that is important to stay active in the user community on a consistent basis. I have worked with different technologies (both MS and  non-MS) throught out  my career but I can safely claim that the MS SharePoint community is like no other. The passion for community contribution is go great amongst the SharePoint users (developers, admins, end users alike). So I would also like to thank the community, the users all over the world, who work so passionately with SharePoint and share their experiences on blogs, forums, etc. It just feels great to be part of this excellent user community.