Book Description

Microsoft Silverlight is a powerful development platform for creating rich media applications and line of business applications for the web and desktop. Silverlight enables you to create, customize and design rich enterprise dashboards that highlight Key Performance Indicators for your business.

Microsoft Silverlight 5: Building Rich Enterprise Dashboards is a concise and practical tutorial that shows you how to create, customize and design rich enterprise dashboards with Silverlight.

This book provides real world user experience design topics and starts by providing an overview of the Silverlight Platform and the clear advantages it provides for building dashboards. The book then dives into topics such as Silverlight design and development tools, building a basic Dashboard, Dashboard types and user needs, Designing for Insight, Styling, Building an End to End Dashboard Solution and Data Access Strategies amongst others.

What you will learn from this book

• Learn how to create custom user controls, reference resources, and edit basic control templates
• Build an end-to-end dashboard solution
• Learn how to use Microsoft Expression Blend to style a dashboard
• Explore the different types of dashboards, and learn how to choose the most appropriate dashboard type based on your project goals Download Now »

Book Description

With Practical SharePoint 2010 Branding and Customization, SharePoint branding expert Erik Swenson cuts through the fluff and discusses accessible, easy-to-understand consulting and processes to create aesthetically pleasing, highly usable branded and customized SharePoint websites, both internally and externally. Designed to be a quick reference, how-to guide that lets you dive straight into the task at hand, you’ll find this book’s attention to detail and pragmatism make it an attractive companion during your branding experience.

SharePoint 2010 deployments are more common than ever, as is the desire to make the environment branded and attractive to both internal and external clients. However, since SharePoint is more than just a collection of web pages, customizing the look and feel and completing the process of branding the platform itself is complex and requires a knowledge of web development, web design techniques, and a familiarity with SharePoint administration—a curious niche, to be sure. And sometimes, you just need to make quick fixes, while at other times, building an entirely customized and branded environment is a multi-step process with lots of stakeholder buy-in and development time required.

Whether you’re interested in applying just a touch of style to a team site, or you’re branding a public-facing Fortune 500 website based on SharePoint, Practical SharePoint 2010 Branding and Customization is the only book you’ll need to quickly, easily, and efficiently brand and customize your environment.

Bonus: Includes the SharePoint 2010 Branding Starter Kit! This kit has everything you need to jumpstart successful and compelling designs. Download Now »

Book Description

Microsoft® Dynamics CRM 2011 Unleashed presents start-to-finish guidance for planning, customizing, deploying, integrating, managing, and securing the newest version of Dynamics CRM. Authored by three leading Microsoft Dynamics implementers, it illuminates new opportunities to deploy CRM as a hosted service (SaaS), integrate with Azure cloud services, and extend CRM through Microsoft’s new online service marketplace. The authors systematically explain how Dynamics CRM 2011 works, illuminating why it works that way, and how to drive maximum business value from it. Drawing on insider knowledge of Microsoft’s new product, they present clear examples, proven best practices, and pitfalls to avoid in using every significant Dynamics CRM capability. Their far-reaching coverage ranges from Dynamics CRM’s sales, marketing, and customer service features to its automated workflows; Outlook and Office integration to reporting and security. This edition’s extensive new coverage includes new chapters on Mobility, the Outlook Client, and Office 2010 integration, as well as greatly expanded coverage of CRM Online. It also contains new or expanded discussions of data visualization, SharePoint Foundation integration, user interface changes, inbuild charts, dashboards, IM and SMS communication support, auditing, no-code workflows, connections, queues, the new WCF-based programming model, UI scripting, and security.

Table of Contents
Chapter 1. New Features of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011
Chapter 2. Why Business Needs a CRM System Download Now »

Book Description

If you were to analyze your team’s performance on a typical project, you’d be surprised how much time is wasted on non-productive tasks. This hands-on guide shows you how to work more efficiently by organizing and managing projects with SharePoint 2010. You’ll learn how to build a Project Management Information System (PMIS), customized to your project, that can effectively coordinate communication and collaboration among team members.

Written by a certified Project Management Professional (PMP) and Microsoft SharePoint MVP with 15 years of IT project management experience, each chapter includes step-by-step guides as well as workshops that help you practice what you learn.

• Build a SharePoint PMIS that requires little assistance from your IT/IS department
• Define access permissions for project stakeholders and team members
• Centralize project artifacts and keep track of document history with version control
• Track project schedules, control changes, and manage project risks
• Automate project reporting and use web parts to generate on-demand status reports
• Integrate project management tools such as Excel, Microsoft Project, PowerPoint, and Outlook
• Apply your knowledge of PMIS techniques by working with a case study throughout the book

“If you are a project manager looking for a technology-based, easily implemented, and usable solution for project communications, document management, and general project organization, this book is for you!” Download Now »

Book Description

Learn to build and deliver SharePoint BI applications

Written by a team of leading SharePoint and Business Intelligence (BI) experts, this unique book-and-DVD package shows you how to successfully build and deliver BI applications using SharePoint 2010. Assuming no previous SharePoint experience, the authors deliver a clear explanation of what SharePoint will do for your BI and information management capabilities.

Each lesson in the book is reinforced with a helpful tutorial on the DVD and cover topics such as interactive reporting with Excel, document sharing for collaborative reporting, and controlling data sources. As you learn best practices for configuring and securing SharePoint 2010 BI applications and planning and implementing your SharePoint BI project plan, you’ll be well on your way to gaining a solid foundation of understanding and working with SharePoint 2010 and BI.

• Provides an invaluable training book-and-DVD package that takes you through building and delivering BI applications using SharePoint 2010
• Features an accompanying video tutorial for each lesson covered in the book, along with a “Try It” section at the end of each lesson
• Covers interactive reporting with excel
• Covers Power Pivot advanced analytics
• Details report and document sharing for collaborative reportingShows how to use SharePoint lists and libraries for data sources repositories in your BI projects Download Now »

Book Description

Few IT professionals take the time to learn what needs to be known to do disaster recovery well. Most labor under the pretense that good administration equals close to five-nines uptime. Most technical people do not see the value of planning for disasters until the unexpected has already happened, and the effects of a disaster involving a SharePoint farm—which today houses business information, line-of-business applications, sensitive information, extranets, and other highly important assets—can be staggering.

Pro SharePoint 2010 Disaster Recovery and High Availability will take you through a step-by-step process to show how to build an awareness and reaction plan for the inevitable. With a focus on real-world experiences and war stories, author Stephen Cummins weaves an expert tale of woe response and offers you:

• Ways to see the warning signs of disaster, and ways to avoid it
• Ways to respond to a disaster while it is happening
• Perhaps most importantly, how to develop a plan to deal with disaster when it inevitably does happen

What you’ll learn
With Pro SharePoint 2010 Disaster Recovery and High Availability, learn and discover:

• How to build resilience and high availability into your systems to make them less likely to fail
• How to use technologies like log shipping, clustering and mirroring to replicate data
• How to use redundancy of web front-ends, service applications Download Now »