I am very happy to announce that printed copies of Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 Inside Out: Mailbox and High Availability are now available. A Kindle version is also available. I know this because Microsoft Press has just told me that they have shipped a box of books (assuming the right one) to the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas for the Exchange Connections conference next week. If all goes well, I shall pick the books up from the FedEx facility in the hotel and be able to give some away at The UC Architects Live panel session on Wednesday at 1pm.

The companion volume, Paul Robichaux’s excellent Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 Inside Out: Connectivity, Clients, and UM, is just a few days behind. Paul did all the hard stuff about the Client Access Server, the range of Exchange clients (including ActiveSync and BYOD), as well as his favorite topic of Unified Messaging. This book can also be ordered now and I am sure will be delivered very soon. Paul is also speaking at Exchange Connections, where he’s doing sessions on “Better Together: Integrating Exchange 2013 and Lync” (Thursday, 10:45am) and “Exchange 2013 Unified Messaging Deep Dive” (Thursday, 2:45pm).

No book is published in a vacuum and I would like to acknowledge the great help and support that I received from many members of the Exchange product group and other Microsoft employees, including Sanjay Ramaswamy, David Espinoza, William Rall, Todd Luttinen, Tim McMichael, Vineetha Kalvakunta, Fred Monteiro da Cruz Filho, Kanika Ramji, Lokesh Bhoobalan, Astrid McClean, Alfons Staerk, Ankur Kothari, Kern Hardman, Andrew Friedman, Abram Jackson, and Scott Schnoll.  The contributions made at conferences such as MEC (soon to roll around again in Austin in April 2014) by many other members of the engineering group such as Greg Taylor and Ross Smith IV were also invaluable, as were those from my fellow MVPs. I’d also like to acknowledge my external reviewers – Paul Robichaux and Jürgen Hasslauer. All of the errors in the book are mine and not the responsibility of the reviewers.

All of which brings me to errata. I think that it must be extremely difficult if nearly impossible to write a book about a technical topic that does not contain some errors, especially when the technology changes so quickly, which is the case with Exchange 2013 and its new servicing model. The great fear is that a major error creeps in and remains in place, undetected by the reviewers and author. Of course, sod’s law dictates that the first error is noticed about thirty minutes after the final text is committed to print and I have noticed a few places that I need to improve through clarification or by removing errors. Sorry about this… Murphy’s Law then dictates that new and interesting information comes to light soon after publication (or is simply overlooked by the author). One example of this is the post about Exchange 2013 server components now available on EHLO. In other words, while the title proclaims “Inside Out”, it cannot cover everything. I will try and do better next time.

Microsoft Press and O’Reilly Media have good systems in place to allow authors to patch electronic versions of books. I’ll be investigating how these systems work over the next while so that any future printings use amended text. I’ll also see what can be done to keep the general content updated to reflect changes that arrive through future Microsoft updates for Exchange 2013.

Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 Inside Out: Mailbox and High Availability is my tenth book covering the evolution of Exchange from Version 4.0 in 1996 to today. I say that each book is my last. The effort involved in writing books about technology in the information-rich web era in which we live today is still rewarding on a human level but takes too long. There’s got to be a better way, but I say that each time too. We’ll just have to see what happens in the future…

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PS: My current list of good technical books is available here…