Liferay Portal Enterprise Intranets: A practical guide to building a complete corporate intranet with Liferay Review

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Liferay Portal Enterprise Intranets: A practical guide to building a complete corporate intranet with Liferay ReviewEnglish is not the author's native language, and in this case it definitely causes some readability issues.
My biggest gripes, however, are with the content itself... or should I say lack of content. If you just stumbled into the concept of portals today and completely missed the documentation on the Liferay website then perhaps this book is for you. Otherwise, save your money and read the installation instructions from Liferay and just play with the software for ten minutes.
The interesting bits in the book are all generalized and only vaguely helpful. It's more like a product demonstration than an actual guide.
I almost gave the book two stars, but I became so frustrated trying to find anything useful in the index this morning that I chucked it into the recycle bin. On second thought, maybe I'll just donate it to the library.Liferay Portal Enterprise Intranets: A practical guide to building a complete corporate intranet with Liferay Overview

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Alfresco 3 Enterprise Content Management Implementation Review

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Alfresco 3 Enterprise Content Management Implementation ReviewWhen I started reading this book I had the sentiment it will be a comparison between the JSF UI client and Share. However, the authors guide the reader through the complete deployment lifecycle, from the installation of Alfresco and MySql to the usage of the exposed interfaces or protocols like CIFS, CMIS and the new Sharepoint protocol.
If you are new to Alfresco you can learn how to customize Alfresco UI or how to configure a SMTP server to work with Alfresco. Users, groups, permissions, roles, authentication and security are well explained, and there are enterprise use cases that can help the reader to put his hands in practice. Integration with LDAP (OpenLDAP and AD, chaining), JAAS, Kerberos, NTLM is completely described and SSO with CAS will help you to round the picture.
This book is not only about explaining what Alfresco is and can do, but it will help the reader to chose the best solution for his installation. Users migration is a big thing for a lot of companies and you will not regret to read this book in order to learn how to do that.
There are also advanced parts like creating custom models, categories, workflows with jBPM. In the chapter 9, the authors show how to integrate external applications with Alfresco. Integrations through webscripts with Droopal, Joomla, FLEX, emails, iPhone, Google, Facebook are very attractive and could be easily extended to a high level enterprise application.
In the next chapter (10), it is clearly explained how one can benefit from the MS Office integration with Alfresco and how to use the Sharepoint protocol, in order to be able to use several repositories with one user interface.
What I did like, simply because I do not have much experience with yet, is the OCR integration the chapter 13. So, scanning and optically recognizing text in documents could be one of the last steps in your document management integration and if you need video or audio transcoding than I can only recommend this book.
In my opinion this book could be useful for system administrators, new and advanced users, as well as managers willing to use a open source content management system in their company.Alfresco 3 Enterprise Content Management Implementation Overview

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Moodle 1.9 E-Learning Course Development: A complete guide to successful learning using Moodle Review

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Moodle 1.9 E-Learning Course Development: A complete guide to successful learning using Moodle ReviewI opened my copy of Moodle 1.9 E-Learning Course Development by William Rice with a high expectation that it would be an informative and practical reference text. Why? I was about to upgrade to Moodle 1.9. Did it meet my expectations?
Now read on...
Using open source software can be a daunting experience, regardless of your technical or business experience, and this text's purpose is to shorten users' path to competency in the application. Broadly speaking, the text covers four Moodle-related activities:
* Installing and configuring Moodle 1.9
* E-Learning course development and delivery
* E-Learning course management
* Moodle administration and maintenance
The author assumes zero previous knowledge of the application, and Moodle 1.9 E-Learning Course Developmentbegins by describing Moodle's Social-Constructionist approach to learning, before bringing the reader on a whistle-stop tour of Moodle 1.9's features and functionality- a very good idea indeed, as this goes some way to providing an understanding of why Moodle 1.9 looks and works the way it does for newcomers, acts as a pertinent reminder for experienced Moodlers, and sets the context for the course creation sections later in the book.
The book is structured in a logical and linear fashion: the author aims to guide you through the full application implementation and course development process. The text seems to be aimed primarily at teachers and trainers and the author spends the majority of the manual discussing - in detail and very effectively - the processes, "how-to's" and "gotchas" of using Moodle from a teaching and training perspective. I must point out that something strange must have happened during the editing process of the book, as there's some glaring typos (and even a whole word omitted from the back cover of the text) which are a distraction, but do not deter from the usability of the manual.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this review, this book was my companion through a recent upgrade from Moodle 1.6 to 1.9, and it did not let me down. As an experienced Moodle user, I used the book very much as a "just enough, just in time" resource rather than as an end-to-end guide through the application. My experience was that the text works very well when used in this fashion. Some other positive aspects of my "user experience" of the text included the author's accessible and direct writing style and use of web-based resources like a downloadable Moodle Project Plan. In my view this text is a straightforward and reliable companion for those who seek to find out more about - and use - Moodle 1.9.
Moodle 1.9 E-Learning Course Development: A complete guide to successful learning using Moodle Overview

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Moodle For Dummies (For Dummies (Computer/Tech)) Review

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Moodle For Dummies (For Dummies (Computer/Tech)) ReviewDisclosure: I write and review Moodle books for Packt Publishing. However, I bought this book myself from Amazon.co.uk so this is an objective review by a reader who paid her own way :)
Its Big Plus: it is much cheaper than the Packt series of Moodle books and, as with all Dummies books, I presume it will be available in stores in the Real World rather than POD (I bought mine from Amazon.co.u. where it was not much more than GBP£10) Its big Minus: it is written for 1.9 and although as the author says, much of the content is transferable, there are some significant differences and major additions that it lacks.
If you want to skip to the conclusion: this is a helpful book, written in a easy to read style. The book is divided up into five sections: Getting Started with Moodle where we consider course layout and enrolment; Creating and Managing Course Content , which is mainly static resources including multimedia and the gradebook; Adding Activities - as you'd expect! followed by Moodle Management and then The Parts of Tens, which fifth section is mainly ideas and suggestions for engaging your learners and keeping them involved.
Each chapter is fully illustrated with clear screenshots and explanatory tables and I cannot praise enough the author's personable style. Having read and reviewed a fair number of Moodle books now, it is increasingly apparent to me that it's difficult to strike a balance between Moodle for admins and Moodle for teachers. If your book IS for Admins or specifically for teachers, then that's fine - but some books, such as Wm Rice's E Learning Course Development (which is being revised for 2.0 ) and indeed my own Moodle 2.0 First Look try to cover both aspects, and it's not at all straightforward. You have to be careful if you are an admin and also a teacher that you don't confuse teacher readers by lettting them think they have more admin rights than they actually do (this was a criticism of the Wm Rice book which I think will be redressed) On the other hand, if you are an admin reading the book, then you will want to know about server issues, bulk user upload, site backup/upgrading etc and not feel sidelined by pedagogical discussions. My own criticism of my own Moodle 2.0 book is that it didn't cover those admin issues in enough detail. Radana's balancing act is a good one as she frequently points readers to the section of admin/teacher that applies to them or to the moodle docs. (Actually, the docs have been altered in the last day, so I presume her links will now redirect to the 2.0 docs) If there is a bias, I feel it is towards the teacher side of Moodle - and that's no bad thing. While the reader is told how they can get hold of a Moodle, there aren't detailed instructions on setting up your own - I reckon, possibly if you are a potential admin with your own server and knowledge of PHP and MySQL, then you probably won't be reading a Dummies book. On the other hand, if you want a quick, no-nonsense intro to Moodle's many activities then this book is very readable.
The first couple of chapters deal with the definitions of CMS. LMS, VLE, LCMS etc and also - to my interest- how to understand our learners and their generational differences. We're in the territory of Digital Natives vs Digital Immigrants here - and, courtesy of Radana, I now know that I am a Digital Immigrant Baby Boomer II whereas my children are Digital Natives Generation Y After busting some Moodle myths, we get on to setting up a course, enrolling users and managing groups. I'd have liked to have metacourses explained here, and also groupings as I think groupings is a very valuable feature especially if you have several groups in one course and you don't want them to see each other's work. Chapters 5 to 7 cover creating content mainly from the "add a resource" drop down, the HMTL editor and also choice and surveys. A section on multimedia is followed by a handy look in at Moodle's gradebook, although again, while the reader is shown how to add new scales, they are not introduced to outcomes and yet I am finding outcomes (criteria/goals/competencies, whatever you call them) are increasingly popular.
The book really comes into its own in the third section where, from chapters 8 to 12 we are taken through Moodle's many activity modules. Radana makes even the highly complex Lesson module accessible to all. Neither the workshop nor the HotPot module is covered here and I think that was a justifiable decision by Radana because in 1.9 the workshop, while usable, wasn't really recommended in its previous state. It's come back with a vengeance in 2.0 though. HotPotatoes was standard in 1.9 but with its eye closed and in 2.0 it has been moved to contrib. (It's still great!!)
If there was a weak area, I would say it was (similar to mine) in the Moodle Management section, Chapter 13 on admin. I felt it was an all too brief run through the admin settings with the occasional inaccuracy and confusion. For instance, if your Moodle front page is your showcase then you need to know more about managing Site Files than you learn here. Additionally, one of the most frequently asked questions on the moodle.org forums is missing - how to get a space in the middle of your front page to add images and wording (tick "include a topic section" in front page settings) That said, the emphasis is definitely on the individual course manager and his/her course, and Chapter 14 is a useful resource for those many readers with that role. The strength of the book lies in its style and the fact that it is written by an educator heavily involved in elearning, keen to link pedagogy to practice.
Not being familiar with the Dummies series, I wasn't aware until I read it that the final part of the book The Part of Tens is meant to include the little extras that don't fit in elsewhere. What a good idea! I enjoyed this - ten questions to ask before creating your course and ten ways to keep your learners involved.
In conclusion then -if you are a techie you might find the book lacking in some areas (which might be filled by Alex Buchner's Moodle Admin soon also available in a 2.o flavour.) However, if you are new to Moodle 1.9 then this book is written in an approachable way, especially if you are a relatively non -technical person "saddled" with admin but mainly focused on using it with your learners. Let's hope there will be a 2.0 version.Moodle For Dummies (For Dummies (Computer/Tech)) Overview

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Using Drupal Review

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Using Drupal ReviewThis book has been eagerly awaited as the first O'Reilly volume covering Drupal, and having been written by such a rockstar team of Drupal pros.
It's also the first book to focus on a wide range of third party contributed modules rather than just Drupal core, or a narrow subject area of modules. It's written for Drupal 6, although the book would be fairly applicable to Drupal 5 (with the caveat that one of the major modules, Views, is completely different for Drupal 6 - the underlying concepts are similar though).
The first thing that struck me about this book is its fundamentally different approach from most early Drupal books, as well as the kinds of books you find in the early stages of any new technology's mainstream acceptance. It's not simply a higher quality rehashing of handbook pages and technical how-tos, but it has an incredibly cohesive and clever process through the entire book.
Every main chapter of the book will:
* Introduce an example scenario that's easy to relate to. For example, an early chapter that covers creating a simple site for a Mom & Pop shop has this sample case study: "in order to update the web page content each week, they currently pay their next-door neighbor Goldie to hand-edit the page"
* Outline what you're going to be building
* Explain why certain decisions or trade-offs were made when creating this site, and highlight alternative choices depending on your particular situation
* Explains step-by-step how to complete the site with lots of tables and screenshots, pointing out gotchas and important concepts along the way
* Ends with a "Taking It Further" section with suggestions for other features or future modules to watch that are related to the site recipe
The hands-on approach of this book takes you through a single, cohesive example in each chapter. This gets you building a site to completion at every step. This approach reminds me of the different ways to learn a musical instrument such as piano or guitar - you can start with theory and technique and practice your scales first, or you can just learn some chords and be able to whip out a few simple pop songs your first afternoon. This book is the chords.
It also has some great moments of explaining fuzzy concepts that are difficult to understand without significant Drupal experience. The Using Drupal team shows their years of expertise training users and implementing Drupal sites in gems such as this, describing whether you should use taxonomy or a CCK field for content categorization:
A general rule of thumb is that if you can remove the field and the content type still makes sense, use Taxonomy. An article filed under a "Technology" category is still an article if you remove the category association, so Taxonomy is a good fit. If the field is part of a piece of content, such as an album's recording artist, then CCK is generally a better choice.

Using Drupal will take you through building a:
* Simple website with blog for a mom & pop grocery store, including a WYSIWYG editor and uploading images to content
* Job posting board for a university, which introduces the key CCK and Views modules
* Product reviews site with user ratings, Amazon product data importing, some simple CSS tweaks using the CSS Injector module, and more CCK/Views
* Wiki, which brings in revisions, input formats, and Pathauto module
* Local arts news site, which takes you into Actions, Triggers, Workspace, Workflow (both as a concept and module), and Views Bulk Operations to create an administration page
* Photo gallery, with ImageField, ImageCache, much more Views and some site display tweaks
* Multilingual website with a strong overview of concepts, then Locale, i18n, and the Localization Client
* Event management site with calendar and attendees
* Online store using Ubercart (focuses on basic store setup, products, attributes, and orders - you'll still need to set up payment methods)
It also covers a few additional topics:
* An overview of Drupal, and where to get help
* Basic theming (this is the only time you'll see code!)
* Installing and upgrading Drupal and modules
* How to choose modules and participate in the community
So what's it missing?
Obviously Using Drupal only scratches the surface of the many, many types of sites you can build with Drupal. There are a few major topics you won't find covered in here - membership sites with protected user access, Organic Groups (a chapter that didn't quite make it due to module readiness for D6), more advanced magazine/newspaper-style sites with modules like Node Queue and Panels, multimedia (there's another book for that!), or social networking sites. However, I think they picked a great selection of site recipes to cover in a relatively small amount of space, and each recipe will get you a solid site built.
The book will also direct you to two additional resources available online: the finished demo site for each chapter for you to browse, and a download package containing installation profiles with the same versions of modules and themes used on each site. The installation profiles will set you up with a clean slate with your modules all prepared for you to start following along step-by-step in each chapter.
Other things I really love about this book:
* It isn't afraid to recommend helpful modules early, such as Administration Menu
* It highlights common newbie gotchas, such as using the blog module when you really want a story
* It points out future modules or alternatives to watch, for example, the WYSIWYG API
* It gives contrib modules such as CCK and Views the foregrounding they deserve when learning Drupal
This is the book I wish I had when learning Drupal. We're even giving away copies of it at [...] because we love it so much. I would recommend it wholeheartedly to anyone new to Drupal, intermediate users who want to take their skills to the next level or brush up on Drupal 6/Views 2, or anyone who actually needs to build a site similar to the recipes listed above. And, y'know, anyone else who's ever built or wanted to build a website :)Using Drupal OverviewWith the recipes in this book, you can take full advantage of the vast collection of community-contributed modules that make the Drupal web framework useful and unique. You'll get the information you need about how to combine modules in interesting ways (with a minimum of code-wrangling) to develop a variety of community-driven websites. Each chapter describes a case study and outlines specific requirements for one of several projects included in the book -- a wiki, publishing workflow site, photo gallery, product review site, online store, user group site, and more. With Using Drupal, you will:Get an overview of Drupal concepts and key modules introduced in each chapter, with a bird's-eye view of each module's specialty and how it worksExplore various solutions within Drupal that meet the requirements for the project, with details about which modules are selected and whyLearn how to configure modules, with step-by-step recipes for building the precise functionality the project requiresGet information on additional modules that will make the project even more powerfulBe able to access the modules used in the chapter, along with other resourcesNewcomers will find a thorough introduction to the framework, while experienced Drupal developers will learn best practices for building powerful websites. With Using Drupal, you'll find concrete and creative solutions for developing the exact community website you have in mind.

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Tiki Essentials Review

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Tiki Essentials ReviewThe book is excellent if you need a quick overview of what can be done with Tiki and get started. The book explores multiple aspects from the installation to advanced features and minor customization. Definitely a must read for anyone undertaking a project using Tiki.Tiki Essentials OverviewThis guide (in Kindle format) is intended for both new and experienced Tiki administrators. Not only will this guide help you improve your Tiki site, but you'll also learn how to get the most out of your participation in the Tiki Community. It will show you how to find what you're looking for and how to become more involved. There are many different ways to contribute to Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware. Paperback version available at http://www.amazon.com/Tiki-Essentials-Rick-Sapir/dp/0557766761/

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