Essential SharePoint 2010: Overview, Governance, and Planning Book Review

So I had all the technical how to books, and some of them covered some governance and planning, but I was left wanting more. I hoped this book would fill in the gaps and it did. The biggest problem I have run into with SharePoint is that there is not enough planning and governance surrounding the use of it. I have been in a lot of environments that started their SharePoint initiatives with a plan that was no more that “Hey why don’t we throw SharePoint up and see what it can do”. Suddenly those curious individuals are using it to share documents. The word slowly spreads that it is available and more users start using it. Then one of the more curious power users (by the way, most of the time in my experience ‘power user’ = ‘dangerous user’) start adding more features and they begin to start using more of the web parts and services available. Next someone realizes you can integrate SharePoint with Reporting Services and they start down the BI road. Before you know it they have a monster on their hands and start looking for someone to clean it up and help manage it, but the cowboys who kicked it all off have moved on!!!! That story has been the same story for every single SharePoint environment I have come across, and I have come across a lot of them. I could have summed all that up with the statement “READ THIS BOOK BEFORE IMPLEMENTING A SHAREPOINT ENVIRONMENT”, but I wanted to give some context to the importance of understanding how planning and governance can impact your SharePoint environment. It is a beast, especially SharePoint 2010. The book is broken down into 3 sections. They are Planning, Optimizing, and Migrating. Some of the topics I found really useful where Why Is Governance Planning So Important?, How Do I Create a Governance Plan?, What Is in the Governance Plan?, Site Architecture, Metadata Architecture, Document and Records Management, Overview of SharePoint Security Elements, Defining and Documenting SharePoint Security, and Customizing the User Experience (UX). I also liked the chapter on Planning for Disaster Recovery: Backing Up and Restoring. We are in the middle of planning that right now and this chapter has some really useful information in it. To get a feel for the author I would suggest going to the book's overview on the informIT site and reading some of the articles in the extra's area. I am in the middle of a SharePoint 2007 to 2010 migration.  This book is going to come in really handy as we start to put some governance in place around the use of the SharePoint 2010 tools.  This does a great job of introducing all the new features available SharePoint 2010. This book not only outlines what governance should be in place, it also helps you understand why it is so important.  That definitely helps when you are in an environment of cowboys who don't like having healthy constraints in place. All in All I highly recommend this book to anyone involved with the administration, implementation, or the development of SharePoint 2010.