A team of crack writers (that means “very good at what they doâ€, not “pipe smokersâ€) from EUSP have been heads down for two months putting together a new type of book: self-published, multiple author SharePoint book. Instead of one person slaving over a hot computer for 9 months to a year, we decided to split up the chores, allocating one chapter per author. Instead of one person proofreading for accuracy, we had 90+ volunteers reading daily, making suggestions and commenting on how to improve the solutions.
Thus was born: Black Magic Solutions for White Hat SharePoint.
About EndUserSharePoint
EndUserSharePoint (@EUSP) is known for creating simple SharePoint solutions that Power Users can implement without access to the server. In this book, we take seven different approaches to working with SharePoint to make it more user friendly. Authors Marc Anderson, Wendy Neal, Josh McCarty, Ben Tedder, Dave Coleman, Eric Overfield, and Paul Tavares take you from from the very beginning stages of using jQuery through the full implementation of solutions that will change the way your users feel about SharePoint.
We had dozens of volunteers from the SharePoint Community help us with the proofreading and copy edits. The authors spent months slaving over the details of their solutions.
How We Did It
We used SPYam as a platform to help us organize the first stage of the project. By using a private channel in Yammer, we were able to hash out ideas, agree on deadlines and exchange the resources that were needed to get started.
A private channel was setup on Yammer for each chapter. A call for community volunteers was made and we were overwhelmed with responses (over 200). Each author was allocated 20 reviewers, who had access to their chapter’s private SPYam channel and could participate in the day-to-day writing and review of the content.
In retrospect, this was one of the smartest things we did. By having input from the volunteers after the initial draft, each chapter had multiple feedback loops that greatly improved the content.