Building Portals, Intranets, and Corporate Web Sites Using Microsoft Servers, 1/e

Rating:
Summary: Finally a book that ties all these products together
Review: As a long-time user of Microsoft products, I have found the array and depth of the various products overwhelming and needed a comprehensive yet easy to understand presentation of the key parts of these products and how they can be used within a portal implementation. While the code fragments were far too technical for me, the rest of the book was very approachable and well worth the time investment to read. I strongly recommend this for all CIOs or people responsible for technical architecture and direction.

Rating:
Summary: Good topic idea but ...
Review: This book explains the concept of portals and how Microsoft enterprise servers handle and implement the features that goes into a portal. The book is written by 3 authors and unfortunately the different writing styles and depth of the subject show.

For example in Chapter 8 Personalization, there is only one page on personalization with Content Management Server. Most of the content in it concentrates on how to do caching in a personalized setting without explaining how to do personalization with CMS in the first place.

In Chapter 5 Portal Framework, it details line by line codes on how to write a portal site in VB.Net. While the code is good, it is too technical compared with the rest of the book. I rather see code snippets on how to build some common components in a portal site instead of a portal application. It is a bit difficult to extract out the code you need as everything is tied together in the architecture. BTW, there is no CD in the book and no hyperlink is mentioned on where to download the source code.

The book has an entire chapter on Content Management Server. It also covers Commerce Server and SharePoint Portal Server quite well and gives a brief overview on BizTalk and InfoPath. I rather see more technical emphasis on how to integrate the different servers than having screenshots of numerous dialogs explaining what each of the fields does.

Finally the book retails at $50 which is far too expensive. It should be around $35 instead.

Rating:
Summary: Broad in scope and audience
Review: While most technology books either pander to Luddite executives or deliver pages of code to professional developers, _Building Portals_ is that rare breed, a tech book with content for managers and architects and developers. Townsend has done a great job capturing the spirit of portals and answering the hardest two questions: "What is a portal" and "What does it do". I passed a dog-earned copy around to some tech-challenged coworkers and it was very well received.