Well, it's been a while since I've been able to put up something new here, but hopefully that will be changing now that I've wrapped up that tiny little book project I'd been working on. I'm sure I'll be talking more about the book in the near future as its release date becomes more of a reality, so I'm just going to briefly touch on it right now as I take care of some general housekeeping items and summarize some of the things that I'm going to be talking about in the coming month or two as I try to get back into the blogging habit.
First of all, the book: SharePoint 2007 Disaster Recovery Guide. Writing the book was an excellent, tiring, challenging experience. I really enjoyed digging into the content and feel great about coming out of it with such a comprehensive treatment. There were several hiccups along the way to completion, some minor and some otherwise, but I'm proud of the finished product and hope its useful. I'm eagerly nervous about its release, part of me is excited to see how it's received and part of me dreads it. As you'll see in the list below, I'll be covering quite a bit more about the book in the weeks ahead, so I won't spend too much more time talking about it, but I will say this: based on the price it's listed for at Amazon ($27 US), I think you're getting a ridiculous value. Yes, I'm biased, but this book is 432 printed pages (plus two online appendices) on SharePoint's backup and restore tools (seriously, the STSADM chapter is over 40 pages!), SQL Server backup, restore, and high availability, Windows Server backup, restore, and high availability, as well as introduces you to Disaster Recovery concepts and best practices.
. Writing the book was an excellent, tiring, challenging experience. I really enjoyed digging into the content and feel great about coming out of it with such a comprehensive treatment. There were several hiccups along the way to completion, some minor and some otherwise, but I'm proud of the finished product and hope its useful. I'm eagerly nervous about its release, part of me is excited to see how it's received and part of me dreads it. As you'll see in the list below, I'll be covering quite a bit more about the book in the weeks ahead, so I won't spend too much more time talking about it, but I will say this: based on the price it's listed for at Amazon ($27 US), I think you're getting a ridiculous value. Yes, I'm biased, but this book is 432 printed pages (plus two online appendices) on SharePoint's backup and restore tools (seriously, the STSADM chapter is over 40 pages!), SQL Server backup, restore, and high availability, Windows Server backup, restore, and high availability, as well as introduces you to Disaster Recovery concepts and best practices. Regardless, if you decide to check the book out, I hope you like it. Either way, please make sure to let me know what you think, I live for feedback of all shapes, sizes, and colors. If I ever choose to do write another, or to revise this one, I'd love to know what I need to do to get better.
The next item on the agenda: I need to do some housecleaning around here. I logged in yesterday and realized that I've had several comments pile up that I need to approve. But instead of just approving them all, I'm going to address them one by one so I can make sure to respond to anything that may require it. I apologize for the delay, it wasn't intentional. I simply made the decision to put blogging on hold while the book was in process (trust me, it wasn't the only thing I put on hold) and never logged in, so I didn't even realize I had the comments coming in. So over the next week (with a pause for the Christmas holiday here in the States) I'll be approving and responding to the comments.
Finally, here's a few of the topics I plan on addressing in the next month. If you have any thoughts, requests, or suggestions please post them as a comment, I'd love to hear them. They're listed in no particular order.
- SharePoint 2007 Disaster Recovery Guide Preview – quick run through of the Table of Contents and overview of each chapter)
- Book acknowledgments – this will also be printed in the book, but I want to make sure to thank the people who helped make this possible (and throw around some link love as well)
- Book giveaway – I'm going to get some copies of the book from the publisher to distribute, so I'll be giving a couple away here (or maybe at Twitter, not sure yet. might want to keep an eye on http://twitter.com/ferringer just to be sure
) - Document Versioning intro – we cover this in the book, so I won't go too deeply here to avoid duplicating content, but I do want to pick back up on this thread from my previous end user DR post
- One or more posts on site administration – the great thing about SharePoint is that it allows business end users to administrate and manage their own sites, but often that's a lot of rope to hang one's self with. So I'm going to be tackling some common administrative activities end users need to know about.
- Review Microsoft's End User Training Kit. It's been out for a while, let's see where the kit is at right now.
- Review Microsoft's GearUp materials for SharePoint from an end user perspective
- Discuss SharePoint integration with various pieces of the Office 2007 suite, such as Outlook, OneNote, and Access
- Your suggestions?
Ok, well this post is too long as it is, so I'm going to wrap it up. It's good to be back, hopefully I remember how this all works and fail to suck at it. And here's to a great 2009!
John
ferringer