Book review: "Seamless Teamwork" by Michael Sampson

Here is my review of Michael Sampson's book "Seamless Teamwork: Using Microsoft SharePoint Technologies to Collaborate, Innovate, and Drive Business in New Way" (available at Amazon.com):

I find "Seamless Teamwork" to be very well written, easy to follow and overall a very usable introduction to anyone who is using SharePoint out of the box and wants to set up SharePoint sites for projects, team collaboration and meetings. It helps you navigate the complex environment of SharePoint, to find the essential features and how to set up SharePoint sites for team collaboration.  

In fact, the book would have been very helpful for me when I first started using SharePoint for the purpose of team collaboration. Now I can simply recommend colleagues and others who seek my help for setting up SharePoint for project and team collaboration to buy and read "Seamless Teamwork" instead of consulting me. ;-)  

The book also does a good job at explaining how to use new tools and technologies such as wikis, blogs and RSS. In this way, it also serves as a good introduction to these tools and technologies for those who are not familiar with them or don't yet understand the business value of a technology such as RSS. 

Furthermore, the book touches on some of the things that are really essential for making collaboration work, such as creating a shared vision. These kind of "collaboration essentials" are well integrated with the more practical hands-on instructions throughout the book.  

From a personal point of view, it would have been great if the book also had touched upon situations where team members might not be using computers with Office 2007 installed, when accessing SharePoint from outside the corporate firewalls or when you need to collaborate with partners and customers. 

To sum up – I find "Seamless Teamwork" to be a very valuable resource that I would (and do) recommend to anyone who is interested in how SharePoint can be used for team collaboration.