In their book Effective Time Management - Using Microsoft Outlook to Organize Your Work and Personal Life, the authors Lothar Seiwert and Holger Woeltje provide a practical guide to using Outlook (as well as OneNote) to create a time-management system. Simply said, they teach you how to become more structured and organised when using Outlook to manage email, tasks, and appointments.

What I really like about this book is that it covers Office 2003, Office 2007, and Office 2010! While Office 2010 is already around for some time, a lot of companies and people still use Office 2007 and even Office 2003. So, even if you have one of the older versions, don't worry, this book gives you detailed instructions on how to do things, such as setting up views in all 3 versions of Outlook.

As for the content, I have to say that I didn't benefit much from it, as I already used most of the advise contained in this book. However, if so far you're using only 'standard' Outlook, meaning you don't let Outlook filter emails for you, you don't create different views for your tasks to get a better overview of what is the most important thing to do, or you don't categorise your appointments to get a better overview of your week, this may be just the right book for you. You will get to learn how to approach each of the facets of Outlook (email, tasks, appointments) and get the most out of them to become more productive, both with techniques ("choose the most important thing that you would do if you could choose only one from your tasks, assign it #1. Then, continue with the others") and 'implementation info' (for example how to customise views so that you get a better overview of your tasks).

Overall, it's a very solid book with useful advise, but nothing really new for people who already looked at time-management methods and use them.

Phil Wicklund's (@philwicklund) book Microsoft SharePoint 2010: Deploying Cloud-Based Solutions came out just last month, and due to my interest in Office 365 I had to purchase it more or less immediately (as usual, ebook so that I can read it on my Kindle; also, I get it immediately and don't have to wait for it, being in Singapore you sometimes need to order from the US). It has been one of the books I've been reading during the past 2 weeks, and it's now time to share my opinion of it.

The book is divided into three parts: the first part talks about what 'the cloud' is and how SharePoint fits into it (basically, SharePoint Online as part of Office 365), and provides some information about its capabilities. Phil also dedicates a chapter to planning for SharePoint Online, including the Information Architecture, security, customisations, and training. In my opinion, extremely important in every SharePoint related activity.

The second part of the book, titled Deploying SharePoint in the Public Cloud, goes a bit more into detail how to start using and managing SharePoint Online. The most interesting chapter here is Chapter 6: Migrating to SharePoint Online, in which Phil lists several approaches of how you can move your content from its existing location (with a major focus on on-premise SharePoint) to SharePoint Online.

Lastly, the third part of the book talks about SharePoint in the Private Cloud. How can you set up SharePoint in your company inside your own Private Cloud, including all the relevant automation. Topics here include virtualisation with Hyper-V, a very good discussion about multitenancy in SharePoint, and how to configure tenant-aware service applications and site applications. While I initially thought that this part of the book is the least interesting to me, it gave me a much better idea of how Microsoft has (possibly) set up and configured Office 365, and why some functionality is not available at the moment (e.g. FAST Search).

What I missed a bit in the book was a better analysis of when and why it makes sense to use cloud technology. While there is a section in the first part of the book that covers this topic, I felt that it was a bit too short, and more information could have been provided. Another thing that confused me occasionally in the first and second part of the book was that there was not always a clear differentiation between SharePoint Online Standard (which you get as part of the 'regular' Office 365) and SharePoint Online Dedicated (which you have to contact MS for). While most of the time Phil notes what is available in or applicable to each of these two and what isn't, I found myself thinking sometimes "this isn't possible in Office 365", only to realise that Phil was referring to the Dedicated version.

Overall, however, I would say that it's a quite good book for anyone interested in learning more about cloud-based SharePoint, providing very useful information for any medium or large sized organisation.

I've had the ebook of Microsoft Project 2010 Inside Out by Teresa Stover, Bonnie Biafore, and Andreea Marinescu on my laptop and my Kindle for quite some time now, but only now I can finally write a review about it.

Consisting of more than 1200 pages, this book basically contains everything you need to know about using Project 2010 to manage projects. Not only does it cover the fundamentals, but it also guides you through how to develop a project plan (Part 2), track the progress of your project (Part 3), and get reports about it (Part 4). Additionally, it covers more advanced topics such as how to manage multiple projects (Part 5), how to integrate Project 2010 with other Microsoft products (Part 6, talking about the Office suite and SharePoint), how to manage projects across your company (Part 7), and finally how to customise Project 2010 to suit your needs (Part 8). Each of these parts consists of several chapters, focusing on different topics related to the corresponding part.

In each chapter, you learn more about the relevant details, and you also get to know some helpful tips. On nearly every page you can find helpful screenshots that support the text well, making it easier to read (the topic becomes less dry!) and understand.

The book serves very well as a lookup resource if you quickly want to check how to do something in Project 2010. In my opinion, it can be considered as one of the standard books that everyone who's using Project 2010 regularly should possess. For beginners to Project 2010, it may contain too much information for a start, Bonnie Biafore's book Successful Project Management: Applying Best Practices and Real-World Techniques with Microsoft Project may be the better choice here.

I honestly have to say (and I doubt that anyone who knows me would disagree), I love my Kindle! To the extent that my beloved better half called it my second wife (or also mistress....jokingly, of course!). It has become my daily companion, coming with me nearly everywhere. But why did I get it? And what do I use it for?

I used to buy a lot of books. The majority of them were business and IT related, but also the occasional fiction. I also tend to buy in bulk whenever there's a book sale going on, as it can be seen from the following picture:

(No, I haven't read all of those SharePoint books, maybe never will...some of them are more for reference/lookup purposes).

However, multiple problems resulted:

a) My shelves were getting fuller and fuller, mostly with books that I only have an infrequent look at (in fact, the shelves were full, the books started to take over the cupboard as well)

b) In the near future, I'd run out of space to put my books (well, we just moved house, our first own place together, and those shelves I was talking about a minute ago do currently not exist yet, as doesn't the cupboard; they were all in the old place, I have no appropriate furniture yet for the books, but I can already say right now that things won't be easier)

c) My better half is slowly growing unhappier (even though she supports my purchases (she loves the nerd in me!), everything has its limits. I am blessed to have such an understanding and supportive wife, but of course I don't want to take this for granted, so I know I had to slow down with my purchases)

And while I wish my "library" looked something like this:

(Photo taken by rochelle, et. al.)

I fear it would soon more look like this:

(Photo taken by Daquella manera)

So, end of last year, I bought a Kindle. The idea was that I would start buying more digital books than physical books, a process that I had already started before that (many thanks to O'Reilly, InformIT, and Apress here, who have daily deals on ebooks!). Ever since, I bought less than a handful printed books!

As for its size and screen, I wasn't totally sure if the 6" screen would be big enough. Also, I heard so many good things about its screen before, but didn't quite understand how much better (or different) it is to a normal LCD screen. When I first took it out of the box, I saw a huge sticker on the screen that I wanted to remove. After trying to peel it off for 3 seconds I realised that it in fact WAS the display.... I've appreciated it ever since. The size is just right in my opinion, making the Kindle small enough to be carried around easily, but at the same time also big enough to allow comfortable reading (you can, of course, adjust the font size for ebooks).

The huge benefit for me now is that I can read more easily, more often, where I want, when I want, what I want. When I'm traveling to work in the morning, during lunch breaks, in the evening in bed, on the plane, and so on, I now have the possibility to just take the Kindle out of my bag, and continue reading one of the many books stored on it. I don't have to bring 3 (more or less) heavy books on a business trip, and then think about the 4th one that I left at home but would prefer to read. If I'm in the mood for fiction, I have a good amount of books with me, if I want to increase my knowledge about SharePoint, the Kindle can help me.

Are there things that I don't like about it? Well, of course there are. One big issue for me as someone residing in Singapore is that I can't officially buy books from Amazon. You need to buy them from the US, with a US credit card (or UK, or Germany, though the US store is definitely bigger than the German one, and maybe also bigger than the UK store). It can be circumvented (more info here), but it's a slightly troublesome process. If I were in the US, buying from Amazon would be as quick as clicking on the "Buy now with 1-Click" button. For me, it's a few more steps (see the link I just mentioned for details). The other smaller issue I have with the Kindle is the way it displays PDFs. It's just not fun in most cases to read an A4 sized PDF on the 6" Kindle screen. You can zoom in, but you would usually see only the top left quarter then (with the possibility to see the other 3 quarters as well, of course; but text usually flows all the way from the left to the right, so I never used this functionality). The better option is to rotate the screen and hold the Kindle in a horizontal position. That way, you can usually see the top third part of a page.

Of course, the Kindle is not the perfect device for everyone and each situation. As for reading those SharePoint books, for example, some of them are better read in a different style (applying your newly learned knowledge about how to create your own Web Part directly on your laptop while the book is still open next to you), and maybe even on a different device (laptop, iPad) / medium (well, printed book). So in the end, before buying a Kindle, think about what you would use it for.

But isn't the iPad so much better??
I was pondering about getting an iPad instead of a Kindle as well. In the end, I looked at my needs, and that was solely reading books. For that purpose, the Kindle is the better choice (better display for reading, better battery life, smaller, thinner, lighter). If you want to do more (browse the web, play Angry Birds, be cool) the iPad might be a better choice.

Think about the difference between a car and a bicycle. A car is faster, more people fit in, in winter it's warmer insider and in summer cooler (if you've got aircon), so much better than a bicycle. But what if your purpose is to drive those 2km to work everyday only? Would you get a car for that, or don't you think that a bicycle is a better choice?

Would you buy it again?

Absolutely! I should have bough it much earlier, actually.

Right now, there's a book warehouse sale organised by Penguin Books at the Singapore Expo.

I was hoping to get some good business books (I didn't....), but didn't even think about any IT books (which I got!). They had several very good books on various topics (Cisco related, Adobe related, Microsoft related, some Unix/Linux books, PHP, Ruby, ...), and to my surprise even three SharePoint books, which I bought:

If I had bought these three books on amazon.com, I would've paid a bit more than $110 (USD, that is). At the sale, I paid $10(SGD) each! At the current exchange rate, that's about $21.72(USD).