I recently received a copy of the new book “SharePoint for Nonprofits: The Definitive Guide to SharePoint for your Nonprofit, Association, Charity and .ORG” by my friends Sean Bordner and John Stover. If you’ve ever had the chance to work with these guys or attend any of their presentations, you know that they are passionate about SharePoint. Their enthusiasm for the platform is also evident in their writing.
I would recommend this book for any association professional who is about to embark on a website CMS selection process, who is exploring new ways to manage association data, or for those who have responsibility for managing or supervising use of the SharePoint platform in an association environment.
The book begins by defining SharePoint simply as “software used to build web sites” and then expands that thesis to a more robust explanation loosely translated to – a single platform that is used across your entire organization, inside and out to increase productivity, standardize documents, templates, business processes, applications and even your application platform.
If you’re not familiar with SharePoint, that definition may sound complicated; however, the authors use real world examples of how associations are using the software to make it easy to understand. This is not a technical reference book on the how-to’s of SharePoint. It was not written for the programmer and developers. Instead, it’s written for anyone hoping to learn how SharePoint’s features offer real world solutions to common business process issues. What distinguishes this book from other SharePoint books is that these guys also understand the nonprofit sector. They understand membership and donor based organizations and the unique challenges that association executives struggle with everyday.
The format allows you to skip around to the sections that are of most interest to you. It includes sections dealing with management topics of project planning, governance, and user adoption. It provides a nice orientation to the SharePoint terminology and spends time explaining hosting and licensing options.
You can order a copy for yourself on Lulu.
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