What are some quality books for planning a Sharepoint site?

Question

Hi all,

I'm looking for recommendations for books to help my two-man team in planning our Sharepoint intranet site. I have worked with Sharepoint some before, but for a site with only about 30 users. This one is going to end up with about 1500 and my head spins trying to think of where to start.

It seems like there are dozens of books out there telling me the "how to's" of Sharepoint but what I really need to know is the "why's", as in "Why use a Publishing Site instead of a Team Site?" or "Why use multiple site collections instead of one site collection with a lot of subsites?"

Any and all recommendations are greatly appreciated.

Z

Answer 1

Technet is pretty good, however it might be wise to supplement those articles with various books depending on the gaps in your knowledge.

Look at this: Planning and architecture for Office SharePoint Server 2007

When you have particular questions ask on forums, or team up with an expert in implementations who can advise you when required.

Regarding your two questions:

• Why use a Publishing Site rather then a Team site? It depends on the functionality you require. Create a demo Sharepoint environment where you can setup sites with each template, and try out their functionality.
  Typically you'd use a Publishing site when a small set of users is publishing data to others. While you'd use a Team Site, when a group of users is collaborating together.

• You'd use multiple site collections if your estimations of the size of the site collections indicate they'll breach the limits of Sharepoint (Roughly 100GB depending on hardware.), or if they have different management teams.

Answer 2

Our team has copies of several of several books, and they've been very helpful. Here's a few.

Beginning SharePoint 2007 Administration

Pro SharePoint Solution Development (for developers)

Microsoft SharePoint Unleashed

Answer 3

'Professional SharePoint 2007 Web Content Management ...' by Andrew Connell is by far the best book for what you are facing - I just completed an Intranet for 800 employees and I had to learn this stuff from scratch - this book is what really helped me:

Professional SharePoint 2007 Web Content Management Development: Building Publishing Sites with Office SharePoint Server 2007

Each site collection is its own administrative entity. And each time you add a new site collection, you are doubling the admin workload if you are the ones responsible for the admin. For 30 users, stick to a single site collection unless the governance explicitly calls for something else. More site collections can also mean more down time when backing up and restoring :-)

Here's another piece of advice: don't even think of going into production until you have verified and documented your backup and restore process. In fact, I created a team blog to document everything I did. The definitive guide to backing up and restoring:

'SharePoint 2007 Disaster Recovery Guide'

If your site is going to involve much coding, then you will need to look at 64-bit as that is the only platform supported as SharePoint moves forward.