I was tinkering about with Community Server yesterday to see what it was all about - it looks like a nice enough product, and it should be quite customisable, but finding out how to customise it will be another matter. It seems that much of the documentation is targeted at the day-to-day admins who will use the internal configuration options and settings to get the site looking and working the way they want it to, but when it comes to development-level customisation, where's the information I need? The clue turns out to be on the front page of the default site - a link to the Professional Community Server book on Amazon.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure it's a great book - the CTO of Telligent has commented as such in a 5-star review on Amazon that:
"You guys wrote a great Community Server handbook that every one of our new, and existing, clients should have in their hands."
Indeed - an extra few dollars in the bank paid for by the developer. I'm all for people writing books about products to provide people with extra insight and useful information, but when it's people working on the product team writing the book, I feel a little bit cheated - if they are going to the trouble of writing about the product, why couldn't they just put the information in their documentation? Or make it clear from the start that they didn't want to provide built-in documentation for developers, and that if you wanted to really customise the product, you'd have to buy the book? The guys behind Community Server, Telligent, are a well-respected crew, so their approach has surprised me.
Thing is, I'm finding similar frustrations with Microsoft's own documentation these days, although the trend in Microsoft is to get the product teams to blog about how to perform the more advanced tasks that you might want to do with products like SharePoint. MSDN is already vast, massive and unwieldy, but it feels strange and somewhat annoying that all the useful information about SharePoint that I've found is scattered across the blogosphere. It would be really useful if someone could at least collate the most useful and interesting blog posts about each product and compile some kind of official(ish) index of links on MSDN to external sites. New blog posts by Microsoft developers could be linked in to the repository as appropriate and external blog posts could also be added, depending on the quality of the information. It would save developers like me many hours of Googling for information on thing like designing site templates, or creating custom workflows. I guess I could always buy a book, but there just aren't that many unbiased reviews of SharePoint books out there yet. Add to that the fact that I now live near a town, not a big city, so I can't just pop in to a local book store and flick through all the available books (the Computers section in my local Borders is laughably small).