Intranet & content management

Reality ColdFusion is a new series of books by Macromedia Press.
The series describes real life problems and real life solutions and is not designed for beginners.

This book details 5 specific projects:

• The Intranet.
  This is a full blown intranet system. It features an underlying content management engine, security and access control, as well as interfaces for searching and personalization.
• Personal Information Management.
  This application provides access to e-mail, directory services and other corporate back-ends.
• Human Resources.
  This is a forms and workflow application. It features form management and routing, data import and export, XML integration, as well as data reporting and analysis.
• Project Requirements.
  This is a project planning application. It features systems to create and define projects and associated tasks, manage data, provide feedback and more.
• User Interaction.
  This is a collection of related community applications. Included are a real-time chat engine, instant messaging and threaded discussions.

What's so interesting about this book is that each chapter starts with a company with a problem... This problem is then analyzed and solved. The information in this book is valuable because it deals with real life situations, it includes memos from development meetings, development to customer communications, design maps and much more.

What's so good about this book is that when you finish studying the sample project chapter you know how each section in the provided finished application came to life and you can recreate them or modify them to suite your needs.

This book will not teach you how to code basic things in ColdFusion MX, go get CFMX Web Application Construction Kit for that purpose, this book will go in much much deeper, doing alittle flash remoting, making a CFC to control Content Management, discussions of the development on why the coder did things a certain way and why databases are built the way they are built, etc, etc.

Update: 2 weeks after I posted this "review ?" I discovered a bug in the update routines of the first project, the intranet content management system. I reported it as a good reader does and got a reply that the files would be updated in 3 days. That was december 5th last year and today it is still not fixed :-(