SharePoint 2010 Power User Resources

As part of my job in Puzzlepart I regularly engage with super users and power users who work for our customers. I also give training classes with our partner company Glasspaper.

These users are often not developers but still they are able to configure and update a SharePoint solution. Some of the more tech savvy may even use SharePoint Designer to do customizations or create work flows.

In this blog post I have collected resources that I often reference in these sessions.

Some good books on SharePoint

• Essential SharePoint 2010. This is one of my favorites. It includes topics on planning and governance.
• SharePoint 2010 User’s Guide. Step-by-step instructions on how you do things in SharePoint.
• Professional SharePoint 2010 Branding and User Interface Design. Good book on how to brand a SharePoint site, create master pages, CSS, HTML, layout pages etc.
• Beginning SharePoint Designer 2010. Introduction to SharePoint Designer as a tool.

Planning and Customization

• Manage sites and site collections. Useful info on when to create a site collection and when to create a sub site.
• Formulas in calculated columns. Some examples of formulas you can use to create calculated columns.
• Adding left navigation menu to web part pages. Useful blog post by my colleague Mikael Svenson.
• Sensible Document Template file management with Sharepoint. Many users are confused by how to manage document templates in SharePoint. In this blog post Mads describes how you should do it. Written for SharePoint 2007 but still very relevant.

SharePoint Design

An engaging user experience, a compelling design and good document templates can make a SharePoint solution go from good to great. We have the benefit of having a very talented and skilled art director on the team who also knows SharePoint and skilled developers who know how to implement this efficiently.

It is also possible to cheat a bit on this as a power user and do some simple modifications yourself. Hare are some resources to get you started:

• SharePoint 2010 Themes and Resources for Upgrading a Custom Master Page. Covers how to change the theme from Power Point (which has it’s quirks, should get Chris to write a blog post about that!). Also covers master pages and has some useful links.
• Starter Master Pages for SharePoint 2010. Good starting point if you want to create your own master pages.
• SharePoint 2010 Base CSS Classes. Goes through the anatomy of a SharePoint page and the CSS classes in a page.

SharePoint Search

• Document Thumbnails and PowerPoint Preview for your search results without installing FAST for SharePoint and a web part  for the purpose.
• Three reasons you should upgrade to FAST Search for SharePoint.
• Why your SharePoint 2010 Search Sucks.

Info Worker VM

• Info worker virtual machine (Hyper-V). The virtual machines used in some of the training classes. Note! Now updated with SP1.

Other?

Some really good resources missing? A link that should be replaced? Please comment below and I will try to keep this list fresh!