There are two books I’ve used over the past 25 years when I want to do a quick refresher on business structure and business management: The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt and The E-Myth by Michael Gerber. These books, although old in bookshelf time, are still as relevant today as the first day I picked them up.

I didn’t realize it until I was working through the new Michael Sampson book, Seamless Teamwork, that there is a common thread in the first two books. Each is written in a novel format. There is no step-by-step guide, no "Best Practices" chapter, no long list of reference material. There is a story and that story is used to put theoretical concepts in context. Michael has used the same approach in Seamless Teamwork.

My style of teaching is through storytelling. I think people need context as much, or even more than, they need stacks of step-by-step guides. The premise of Seamless Teamwork is that a manager has been given a project and he is using SharePoint to help manage that project, from the analysis phase all the way through the approval phase. Unlike the business structure books, step-by-steps are included, but aren’t really essential to the story.

There are tons of excellent resources, such as Rob Bogue’s The SharePoint Shepherd’s Guide for End Users, that can help End Users get over the initial hump of using SharePoint. But what is usually missing in function set instruction is the context for the End User and Information Worker… not "how" would I use this thing called SharePoint but "why" would I use it, what can it do for me? I think Seamless Teamwork is a good step towards filling that gap.

Honestly, I skipped the "how to" parts because I’m a sucker for a good story. You can anticipate from the beginning that this will be a SharePoint success story or why else would he have written the book? How he gets there is the intriguing part. How can you use SharePoint to setup and manage the information about your project? Reading through the project manager’s thought process is the essential content that gives you the context and solution to basic, project management problems.

If you are like me and get as much from a good story as you do from from a technical manual, give this one a try, Michael Sampson’s Seamless Teamwork.

For a second opinion on Seamless Teamwork, Kanwal has written of review at SharePointBuzz.com .

Links to resources in this article

• The Goal
• The E-Myth
• The SharePoint Shepherd’s Guide for End Users
• Seamless Teamwork
• SharePointBuzz.com