Thoughtsofanidlemind's Blog

I blogged a few days ago about the need to reduce the size of my Exchange 2010 SP1 book to bring it down from the 1,600 or so pages that Microsoft Press has estimated its current size to something more reasonable of the order of 1,100 or so pages. Still a heavy book, but maybe one that is still in the category of “portable”.

I’ve made two passes through the book so far to:

1. Eliminate unnecessary text – some thoughts that don’t add much value always creeps in over time, especially when you write over an extended period. I’ve been writing this book for just over a year now.

2. Eliminate unnecessary screen shots. It seems to be a trend of computer books to include a mass of screen shots to illustrate points. I see the value because it’s good to be able to validate what you see on your screen with the instructions given in the book. However, I think it’s fair to say that there are usually too many screen shots in books today. An average screen shot takes up about half a printed page so they do swell the size of a book. I have managed to eliminate 71 screen shots (there are still over 400 remaining) and I don’t think that their loss will compromise the integrity of the book at all.

3. Eliminate chapters. This is the step with the biggest impact but it’s also the one that causes most reflection. After all, the reason why a chapter is included in a book is because the author considers its content to be worthwhile – or at least they did at one point in time. I had 20 chapters in the original mega-draft and have decided to cut three. These are:

a) Hardware – reflecting on previous books, I conclude that it is a fool’s errand to write about hardware for any particular software release because the software and hardware change so rapidly. I therefore decided to cut the short chapter that I had to discuss topics such as the impact of the changes in the Store on storage options.

b) Public folders – the cockroach feature of Exchange that cannot be eliminated by the product group because public folders are embedded so firmly into the IT operations of many companies, including many that bought into the original vision of “public fora” and electronic forms preached by Microsoft when they shipped Exchange 4.0 in 1996. Of course, this was proved to be an utter fallacy and no more than an immature and half-baked competitive move against Lotus Notes, but public folders have proved their value as replicated repositories since 1996. However, there isn’t much change around public folders in Exchange 2010 and so I decided that the chapter describing how to manage them had to be sacrificed.

c) Moving Exchange to the cloud. There’s a lot of debate around using the version of Exchange included in Microsoft’s BPOS online service. BPOS doesn’t include Exchange 2010 yet and while I think the chapter made many excellent points about the issues that companies have to face if they consider moving from on-premise servers to BPOS, it had to be eliminated to move the book towards an acceptable size.

I’m still not done as there are more screen shots and text to eliminate. However, I think the major cuts have been made as I don’t see another chapter disappearing (some may need to be slimmed). The frustrating thing is that I learn more about Exchange 2010 every day and continually uncover facts and insights that could be in the book. Maybe I will end up with a second volume… now, that would be an interesting thing!

– Tony

The need to transform all the screen shots to use approved names for people and servers has slowed things down a tad but I think we are now back on schedule. The manuscript is now circa 437,500 words, mostly because I can’t stop making changes to text as I go through the chapters to revise with the updated (and approved) names, but also because I keep on finding new material that’s interesting and worthwhile. For example, Microsoft’s TAP call on Transport changes in Exchange 2010 SP1 this week was very interesting and generated three new pages of information. I’ve also had some interesting experiences unraveling the complexities of Outlook Protection Rules and how legal investigators can access IRM-protected content that is uncovered by a mailbox search. Both issues have resulted in substantial correspondence with engineers to figure out what’s going on. Such is life.

The aim is to hand over the complete book to Microsoft by June 4. Eleven chapters have been submitted so far and I have six more that should be ready to go later on today. That leaves three to complete next week and the major thing that’s holding them up is a number of queries that I have open with the development group (who are doing an excellent job of responding to my many varied questions).  Of course, once the chapters are submitted a new phase opens and I’ll have to start to respond to the gentle probing of the technical reviewer – but that’s work for June and July and I won’t worry about it for now.

– Tony

I haven’t been adding much text to this blog recently but that’s because I was away in France and have been busy submitting the first chapters of my SP1 book to Microsoft Press.

The trip to south of France was interesting. We had 3 degree C weather in the Narbonne area coupled with driving rain. Not what you’d expect in May in the region of France that statistically receives most days of sun annually! In any case, we had a good look around the area of the Canal du Midi, Narbonne, and Carcassonne and formed some idea of what’s possible in terms of houses.

The trip back was interesting. Volcanic ash drifted down from Iceland and forced Irish airlines to cancel flights. We arrived into Gerona airport (very nice, very clean, very efficient) for our Ryanair flight to Dublin and found that it was cancelled. We decided to reroute through the UK and switched to a Ryanair flight to Bournemouth, using the logic that once we were in the UK it would be easier to get to Ireland. A series of trains followed before we eventually arrived in Holyhead (http://raileasy.co.uk proved a very effective way of booking cheap rail tickets) to get the Irish Ferries fast catamaran to Dublin port.

On the book front, I have now submitted three chapters (of 20) to Microsoft Press and plan to submit another six by the close of tomorrow. These chapters will be formatted and cleaned up by Microsoft Press and then passed on to the Technical Editor for his perusal, validation, and comments. Eventually I get the chapters back for to respond to the comments and queries and to generate the final text. Eleven chapters are still being worked on because:

• I haven’t done the work to write about a specific feature
• A feature isn’t fully baked in the current build of Exchange 2010 SP1
• I have questions that are awaiting response from the Exchange development group (who are very responsive to queries and willing to share information about their product)

As Microsoft gets close to releasing their public build of Exchange 2010 SP1 at TechEd North America in New Orleans in June, I anticipate that all of the features should be ready and the questions answered, so all that will be left to do is a little matter of writing. So far the word count in the manuscript is some 420,000 words and there will be more – be warned that this will be a heavy book.

I also have to work on an article for Windows IT Pro Magazine about Exchange 2010 SP1. The challenge here will be to boil down all of the material that I could write about into 2,500 words. That’s a task for another day… back now to the chapters that need to go to Microsoft Press.

– Tony