Title : SharePoint 2010 for dummies

Author : Vanessa L. Williams

Summary :
This book places the readers at the place of a user or a power user of the SharePoint 2010 platform. It describes the functionnalities or feature of the lists, document libraries and goes through the different aspects of SharePoint 2010. But it does not stop at the end-user level and goes beyond, by explaining some tricks or some administrator functions.
Several advanced features are demonstrated, like the Excel Services, the Business Connectivity Services, just to name a few.

Book Review :
Ok, colleagues were wondering why I was reading such kind of book. That is true, if you want a developer or a complete guide to SharePoint 2010, pass your way, this book is definitely not for you. Anyway, when all the day-long you work either as a developer or working at the implementation of a SharePoint 2010 solution, there is a tendancy to forget the basics, or just how users are approaching the product. Not only that. It is the kind of book that your users or your clients will read most likely. It is always good to put yourself in their shoes and see SharePoint from their viewpoint, just to see how they understand the product.
For someone that has already some notions of SharePoint, this book is easy to go through. It has a good level for end-users and power users (not administrators !). Finally, it is interesting to see it as a starting point for other books going more deeper in SharePoint 2010 and definitely, a book that SharePoint users should have.

You may not have notice, but this blog has been upgraded.

As it was running on an old version of the DasBlog engine, it was the time to upgrade to the version 2.3. It is now done and running...

In SharePoint 2007 we had a problem when we wanted to create calculated columns using either the [Today] or [Me], respectively giving the current date and the current user. If you search on the web, a lot of pages are describing and talking about the workaround. The workaround is to create a "Today" or a "Me" column with the standard and default settings, writing the formula and then, finally, to delete the created columns.

I hoped that in SharePoint 2010, this was fixed. But when I created my first calculated column based on dates, here is what I got :

Exactly the same error we have in SharePoint 2007.

And.....exactly the same workaround. So, is it not considered as a bug or a problem for Microsoft ? Sure, there is a workaround, but it is quite annoying to create columns just to delete them right after. And, last but not least, when the formula has to be udpated, ensure that these columns are present otherwise, it will be impossible to save the new formula.

UPDATE

I got a correction from Ryan (see comment below) and indeed, the what-was-called-so-far-a-workaround in many pages on the web (and here also :-) ) is in fact not a viable solution. In fact, the column using this "trick" will only be updated and calculated when the item is updated. To see the confirmation of this, create a column with a formula like this : =IF([StartDate]>[Today],"Future","Started") with StartDate being a manually-set date and wait for that StartDate to be reached. If the item is not updated, the column will keep the "Future" label.

Anyway, the fact that it is not possible to have such functionality in SP2010 is a bit pity.

Thanks to Ryan for the correction