For The User

Just wanted to get a quick note out there that Darrin Bishop has been kind enough to invite me to speak about SharePoint Disaster Recovery at the Central Illinois SharePoint User Group in August, so I wanted to provide the details on it for anyone who wants to come heckle/question/annoy/encourage me.

Below is the full write-up on the event from Darrin, he does a great job of covering it all so I'll just let him take it from here:

Please join us for the next meeting
of the Central Illinois SharePoint User Group.

The Central Illinois SharePoint User Group provides a venue for anyone who is
interested in learning more about Windows SharePoint Services and Microsoft
Office SharePoint Server. We hope to provide a means for organizations within
the Central Illinois region to connect and discuss all areas of SharePoint with
the help of some great speakers. If you are thinking about SharePoint, starting
with SharePoint or have a long history of using SharePoint we hope you will
spend the morning with the group and help spread the knowledge.  Please
pass this invite along to anyone who has an interest in SharePoint.

Topic:
A look at the options available for preserving your SharePoint environment and
how disaster recovery goes far beyond just running regular backups or using a
tool to save your content. John Ferringer, co-author of the "SharePoint
2007 Disaster Recovery Guide," will cover disaster recovery concepts and
strategies, explaining terms such as recovery time objectives and recovery
point objects and why DR is so much more than just backing up your SharePoint
sites. John will also be discussing the benefits, limitations, and potential
scenarios for the many tools Microsoft makes available to backup and restore
SharePoint, with a focus on finding the right fit for a variety of situations
and environments.

Speaker :
John Ferringer is a Solutions Architect for Apparatus, Inc. in Indianapolis,
IN, with over five years of experience administering and supporting SharePoint
technologies and has spent over eleven years working in the information
technology consulting industry. He co-authored the "SharePoint 2007
Disaster Recovery Guide", published by Charles River Media in January,
2009 ( www.amazon.com) He
is also a Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist in the installation and
configuration of Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) v3, Microsoft Office
SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007, and Microsoft System Center Operations Manager
(SCOM) 2007.

When: Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Doors open at 8:30 AM
Presentation at 9:00 AM
Open Discussion after presentation

Where: LRS, Education Center
2451 W Monroe
Springfield, Illinois
http://maps.live.com/?v=2&ss=ypid.YN292×5808715&encType=1

Contact: Darrin Bishop, http://darrinbishop.com>

This is the second Central Illinois SharePoint User Group meeting. We have
secured enough room, coffee and breakfast snacks for twenty to thirty
attendees. Feel free to contact http://darrinbishop.com>
if you plan to attend so we can ensure we have enough room, coffee and food for
all. Special thanks to Levi, Ray and Shoup, Inc. for providing the meeting
space and coffee. If you are interested in speaking or assisting the Central
Illinois SharePoint User Group please contact http://darrinbishop.com.

I just wanted to put a quick note out there that you can download the slides from the presentation Sean McDonough and I did today at SharePoint Saturday Ozarks on SharePoint DR: Saving SharePoint at the following URL:

• HTTP://drop.io/SavingSharePoint

If you use these slides for your own presentation, I would ask that you contact Sean or I and let us know you're doing it. If you modify it at all, I'd love to know what you're doing so we can encorporate them into our deck for the future

Thanks!

John

Did that get your attention? Good.

I’m just going to do a quick post before I head out for the weekend to let you know about a few things I’ve got going on out there in the meatspace (you know, that place away from your computer monitor with the bright yellow ball in the sky and the incredible resolution…). Think of it as Proof of Life, since I’ve been so remiss in posting here in the last month or so.

In a little less than two weeks on May 12th I’ll be giving a presentation at the St. Louis SharePoint User Group and participating in a panel discussion after the presentation. My talk is titled “Saving SharePoint”, and I’ll be covering SharePoint Disaster Recovery, focusing not only on the tools available for backup and restore but also DR as an overall strategy. I’m pretty excited about the topic, since I spent so much time researching and diving into it for the SharePoint 2007 Disaster Recovery Reference Guide. Plus it will be great to actually meet IRL all the great STL SharePoint people I’ve met on Twitter so far (and @ToddKitta). 

For more information on the event, you should definitely check out the St. Louis SharePoint User Group’s site, it’s got all the details on the location and start times for the event. If you can make it, make sure to register so I know how many people are coming to heckle me And if you’ve got any recommendations on things to do in STL, let me know in the comments. My wife and I are planning on doing it as a family vacation for us and our toddler (she’ll be two in July), so we’re going to visit the Arch, the St Louis Zoo, and The Magic House but are always looking for other good suggestions of things to do and see.

In June I’ll be speaking at the Evansville SharePoint User Group on June 11th. The topic for that one is still a little undetermined, it will either be Saving SharePoint, SharePoint Online as an Extranet, or both. I’m also really looking forward to this, for a multitude of reasons. The big one is again the opportunity to meet some great SharePoint people that I’ve connected with online, namely Rob Wilson and Jill Epperson of KellerSchroeder. My wife is originally from about an hour away from Evansville and I always enjoy visiting her family. I’m hoping we can also turn that into a nice vacation, hopefully relaxing somewhere down on the Ohio River.

I’ll put up more info on the Evansville UG as I have it, and will be making an effort to return to consistent blogging next week as well. Until then, everyone have a great weekend, I’m off to see Wolverine!

jf

Work is kicking my butt right now, so I'm going to take care of this now so I can get this information up and give everyone a chance to win a free copy of my book.

I'm doing two different types of giveaways for the SharePoint 2007 Disaster Recovery Reference Guide, with two copies each for each method available. All entries must be posted either here on my blog or on Twitter by 2 PM EST on Friday, February 6th, 2009. At that time I will draw the two winner's names at random and post the results on this here blog.

1. The first way you can win is by posting a comment on my previous blog post (the book's Table of Contents Preview) with a suggestion for additional material that could go into a subsequent re-write or supplemental material for the book (keep in mind this is simply hypothetical, there's no current plans to do such a thing, I just would love to know your feedback on what we missed). I know that the list may not give you a full idea of what's in the book, but it should give you a general idea of what we've got. Please make sure to include at least your name when you post a comment so that I know who it can be attributed to.
2. The second way you can will is a little bit more goofy, but I wanted to have some fun and use Twitter. So here's the deal: make a post on Twitter as a reply to me (@ferringer) with these two pieces of data: your estimate of how many years I've been shaving my head and the month I started doing it. The number of years will be used to determine the winners, and if there are more than two people who guess the correct amount of time I'll use the month as a tiebreaker. If that still doesn't break the tie, I'm considering either a basket-weaving or macram‚ competition (it's all about the arts and crafts!). Please make sure to make the Tweet as a reply to me, otherwise I might not see it. As a not-so-special but added bonus, I'll also start following/stalking everyone on Twitter who participates
3. If you don't win those, there will be a special second chance drawing for all entrants for one last book.

If you're related to me, work with me, or married to me, you are not eligible for this contest (sorry). Winners will have their names (and/or Twitter accounts) posted here. If I am unable to contact the winners for a viable mailing address, a runner-up will assume the duties of the winner if for some reason he or she cannot fulfill those responsibilities. Void where prohibited, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera /The King and I

Ok, best of luck to everyone, I'm looking forward to your ideas and guesses.

Below is the Table of Contents (ToC) for the SharePoint 2007 Disaster Recovery Reference Guide along with my personal descriptions and commentary. You can also see the book's ToC on Amazon for a complete outline of each chapter right here.

NOTE: I'll be firing off an additional blog post shortly detailing how I'll be giving away five copies of our book. I recommend reading through this list and maybe even checking out the ToC link on Amazon, as it will be useful for you if you're interesting in winning one of those copies.

1. Getting Started with SharePoint Disaster Recovery – To quote Rage Against the Machine, “It has to start somewhere. It has to start sometime. What better place than here, what better time than now?”
2. End User Resources – In this chapter we cover some of the ways end users can help themselves preserve critical resources, documents, and data with functionality built right into SharePoint. The two big topics are Recycle Bins and Version Control, but we also talk about exporting list templates, WebDAV, and the Explorer View option.
3. SharePoint Designer's Backup and Restore Tools – Now we're starting to move away somewhat from SharePoint's end user Disaster Recovery (DR) resources, but not completely. SharePoint Designer (SPD) sits in an interesting place, positioned as a tool that can be used by end users, developers, designers, and administrators. The chapter covers the mechanics of the various ways a site can be backed up and restored via SPD and discusses the advantages and drawbacks to those approaches.
4. The Central Administration Site's Backup and Restore Tools – Now we're getting into the administrative experience for SharePoint DR. Chapter 4 provides information on the Central Administration (CA) site, prerequisites for using it's DR tools, detailed steps for how to backup and restore SharePoint through the CA site, and the pros and cons of its use.
5. STSADM's Backup and Restore Operations – This chapter is very similar in its approach to the CA site's chapter, except that now we're covering the STSADM.exe command line tool for SharePoint administration. It dives into the differences between using it for site collection backups and restores versus catastrophic backups and restores, and the pros and cons section also details with the differences between STSADM's backup/restore and export/import operations.
6. Tips and Tricks for SharePoint's Built-In Backup and Restore Tools – This chapter rolls up quite a few best practices, gotchas, tips, and tricks that you may encounter when using the CA site or STSADM for DR. A lot of them are pretty self-contained, but the chapter is basically divided into two sections, one dealing with specific common problems and one for SharePoint DR administrative best practices.
7. Custom Development and Scripting for SharePoint Disaster Recovery – Chapter 7 covers the groundwork you need to understand before developing your own custom solution for SharePoint DR. This can fall into two main categories: scripting and full application development. We didn't really get into a lot of specific code for this topic, because there are so many different directions you can go in to accomplish your goals for SharePoint DR. Instead, we show you some of the options available as well as the various implications your decision may have.
8. SQL Server 2005 Backup and Restore – The name of this chapter pretty much says it all: it details how to backup and restore databases in SQL Server 2005. We do discuss the other database options for SharePoint, but at the time we wrote this chapter we felt that the 2005 release was the one most likely to be in wide use and our time was best spent focusing on it. While the actual procedures shown in this chapter can really be used with any SQL Server 2005 database, we also spend a good amount of time discussing their implications in a SharePoint environment and how SharePoint's specific needs and configuration can impact your approach.
9. SQL Server 2005 High Availability – A comprehensive DR approach goes way beyond simply backing up and restoring your data, files, and environment; you also need to design it to stay up and running in the face of adversity, known as High Availability (HA). Chapter 9 covers the three methods available for making SQL Server 2005 highly available and weighs the pros and cons of each with regards to SharePoint.
10. Windows Server 2003 Backup and Restore – Much like SQL Server 2005, we decided to focus on backing up and restoring Windows Server 2003 and SharePoint's crucial supporting platforms that run on it. Specific resources to backup such as the 12 Hive, IIS, the Global Assembly Cache, etc are discussed, as well as how to use Server 2003's built-in backup and restore tool
11. Windows Server 2003 High Availability – The two main topics here are load balancing your SharePoint servers (discussing both software- and hardware-based load balancers) and other targets for HA design (storage, server clusters, infrastructure redundancy).
12. SharePoint Disaster Recovery Planning and Key Concepts – This is where we start to move away from the technical aspects of SharePoint DR and start to deal with the concepts and procedures of a comprehensive SharePoint DR approach. DR Planning is not unique to SharePoint, and this chapter is intended to give you an introduction to some of the terminology and activities that go into creating a well-design DR plan for SharePoint.
13. SharePoint Disaster Recovery Design and Implementation – Chapter 13 walks you through the key aspects of creating and implementing a SharePoint DR plan. It is intended to get you thinking about what you should include in your plan, what it's goals are, and what resources you will need to have to be successful.
14. SharePoint Disaster Recovery Testing and Maintenance – It isn't enough to just write a SharePoint DR plan, if you think that's all you have to do you will be painfully disappointed the first time you need to implement it. We walk you through how to test your plan to make sure it is effective and can be successful, as well as the crucial need to continually maintain that plan once its in place. These aren't necessarily easy things to do, but can make or break a SharePoint DR plan.
15. Conclusion – To quote Ferris Bueller, “You're still here? It's over!”

We also included two appendices for the book, but because of printing constraints they're available online as opposed to being printed in the book:

• Appendix A – This is a summary of a wide variety of Backup/Restore and DR tools available for SharePoint.  Most of them are offered by third party vendors, some are free, and all of them require an additional install beyond SharePoint. We really tried not to show any favoritism (especially since we really don't have much experience with any of the tools), but still give you some idea of what each tool's vendor says it is capable of.
• Appendix B – At the end of each chapter we have several review questions designed to test your understanding of the material we covered in the chapter. This appendix has our answers to those questions, just like your old grade school math book.

As an aside, we really tried to make a point to detail pros and cons for each SharePoint DR task, tool, or approach that is covered in the book.What we found is that there's a lot of different tools, approaches, and methods that you can use as a part of your SharePoint DR plan, and they each can make sense to a wide variety of audiences. Which one is best for you largely depending on your specific needs, requirements, and resources. We really tried to give you the best perspective possible to make that decision, but ultimately its your call.

I had planned on posting this next week because I expected a little more lead time before our book was actually published, but it turns out that Amazon is now shipping the SharePoint 2007 Disaster Recovery Guide, which is a very good thing

I wanted to post my acknowledgements from the book, so I can once again call attention to all the people played such an important role in helping me make our book a reality. Writing the book last year was an incredible challenge and it was very satisfying to finish it, but I didn't do it alone and I was set on the path that led to this book a long time ago. With that being said, I'd like to profusely thank the following people:

• Becky Isserman, for giving me this opportunity.
• David Zinsmeister, for asking me all those years ago if I had ever considered writing something of my own; it's a question I never forgot.
• Ben Frame, Kelly Pfledderer, and all my coworkers at Apparatus for the encouragement and support throughout this process.
• Jeremy Gunter, for starting me down this road in so many ways. I miss you man.
• All the folks on Twitter who chipped in with great advice, information, and verifications: @autosponge, @emilysc, @greenearings, @greghughes, @hipslu, @itchysanchez, @JDWade, @joeloleson, and @Sadalit. That's right, Twitter played a nice big role in helping me getting this book to print. If you're not on Twitter yet, why the heck not?!?
• Steve Pietrek, for all the helpful resources and one unbelievable referral. I'm not sure I'd have finished the book if it wasn't for Steve's input and assistance
• Jennifer Blaney, for her patience and support of a first-time writer.
• Karen Gill, for making it look like I write so purty, offering encouragement, and laughing at all my terrible jokes. I can't say enough good things about Karen and her work. She's a great editor; she's flexible, educates rather than pontificates, has a wonderful sense of humor, and is oh so thorough.
• Sean McDonough, for being a great mentor, keeping me sane, providing great feedback, encouraging my terrible jokes, writing like a madman, and going above and beyond at all times. Words cannot convey how much I appreciate and am thankful for Sean's contributions to this project; it probably would have never seen the light of day if it wasn't for the incredible sacrifices he and his family made for it.
• The two amazing women in my life every day. Piper for making all the late nights, headaches, and long hours that much easier with every smile, giggle, and laugh; and my beautiful wife Gretchen, for suffering through the late nights, headaches, and long hours with me and providing so much encouragement, strength, support, and love.
• I'm going to say it again, although I know that I can never say it enough, thank you Gretchen. Thank you so much. Thank you for supporting me in this endeavor. Thank you for putting up with my tired, grumpy, irrational, moody butt. Thank you for motivating me. Thank you for distracting me. Thank you for everything.

To everyone else I forgot to thank, thank you. To our readers, thank you so much for your purchase, I hope you find the book useful and worth your hard earned money. I hope we show you something you didn't know or didn't consider. And above all else, I hope you're able to take what we've written in this book and begin to ensure the long-term viability of your SharePoint environment.

One thing I realized as I started writing the book (the SharePoint 2007 Disaster Recovery Reference Guide in case you've missed my other posts) was that I was going to be taken a lot of notes and referring to them on a regular basis.  While taking notes with pen and paper is still something I do for my job, it doesn't tend to happen with the volume or frequency I understood was going to be needed for this project.  For this it was going to be important for me to be able to store a lot of information from a variety of sources (such as files, notes, websites, etc) in a central location where I could categorize, annotate, and discover them easily. Luckily I've installed the Office 2007 Ultimate suite, which includes Microsoft OneNote 2007 (its also available as a standalone purchase or in the Office 2007 Home and Student suite).

Briefly, OneNote 2007 is described by Microsoft as “A digital notebook solution, allowing you to gather notes and information in one place.”  I'm not going to go into too much more detail about OneNote's features, suffice it to say that it met all of my needs for the book perfectly.  I could store items, group and categorize them efficiently, and make updates and notes as I needed throughout each item. Not to mention the feature I used more than anything else in the tool: search. By the time I was done with the writing process for the book I had well over 15 sections within the OneNote notebook I created for it, and each section had anywhere from 3 to 30 or more pages within in it.  Searching through this large amount of data saved me countless hours because I could quickly find the topic or note I was covering and incorporate that information right into my chapter in Word.

The other aspect of OneNote that was perfect for my needs was how it integrates with SharePoint.  Just like the other members of the Office 2007 suite, OneNote 2007 notebooks can be uploaded into a SharePoint list as documents.  But OneNote behaves (in my opinion) just a little differently than Word or Excel when you hook it up to SharePoint. Using SharePoint with OneNote allowed me to access, read, update, and add to my notes from multiple computers without having to worry about keeping multiple versions in sync or possibly overwriting previous updates. Since I was often working on the book from different locations (at a client site over my lunch break, from my work laptop when I'd take it home, or from my personal home computer) I needed to be able to easily access my data from a central location, but didn't want to have to deal with manually synchronizing my files or downloading new updates.  The cool thing is that OneNote 2007 does all this for you.

Here's the crazy part. When I started writing this post, I began to outline the steps necessary to connect a OneNote Notebook to a SharePoint document library to create a shared notebook. Fortunately, I didn't get too far into it, because as I was wrapping things up for the evening I was tweeting w/ @MaryCanady and @MrIsaacabout using OneNote and SharePoint. That's when @danlewisnet pointed out that someone had beaten me to the punch with a post detailing exactly that process. (NOTE: for information Twitter, I highly recommend checking out this post I made last year about Twitter and Joel Oleson's post about 101+ SharePoint people to follow on Twitter)

So I cannot strongly enough encourage you to read this post by the Norwegian Microsoft Consulting Services Information Worker team on their MSDN blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/mcsnoiwb/archive/2008/12/03/onenote-and-sharepoint-the-basics.aspx

It's a great post, showing you exactly how to connect your OneNote notebook to SharePoint. The cool thing is that once you make that connection you can view all your OneNote data within SharePoint, meaning you can apply metadata, search it from your SharePoint site, and share it with anyone else who has access to your document library. Plus, OneNote automatically synchronizes its notebooks with SharePoint once you configure the connection (don't worry, you can configure the timing and frequency of the syncing), so you don't have to manually run it to keep things linked up. Its a great way to keep both an offline and online copy of your data in a collaborative environment, which is my book is a great example of effective SharePoint usage.

The first time I installed SharePoint, it made my head hurt. I was going through a whole lot of “newness” in my life at that point. New job (only the second one I'd ever had since college), new teammates, new responsibilities (I had been a developer in my previous life, now I was an administrator), and now this new software, SharePoint. It was hard enough coming to terms with being the enemy (as a developer I always thought that IT admins were there to thwart me, as an admin I've gleefully confirmed that), but on top of that I had to get my head around an unbelievably complex platform. But I was able to successfully install SharePoint Portal Server 2003 on my first try, and more importantly get a portal created and running without error.

When I started to dig into my new SharePoint portal and see what it was all about, I was immediately struck by something that made me a believer in its viability and long-term success: SharePoint's cohesive integration with the Office suite. It just made sense. Microsoft Office is by the far the most widely used office suite in the world, and here was a product that allowed you to store, collaborate, and search on all the documents you created with those tools. To me it was a huge selling point, and I think SharePoint's success over the years has proven that out, especially once Microsoft updated SharePoint with the WSS v3/MOSS 2007 release.

Which brings me to the point of this post: I'm introducing a new theme here at ForTheUser, “Integrating Office” which will highlight how SharePoint can be integrated with the various tools and programs found within the Office suite.  Just to warn you, I'm going to try and focus more on the less talked about components and features, to try and expose you to some topics you hadn't considered before. If you're looking for how to upload a document through Word into a SharePoint site, it probably won't be here (unless you ask for it).  And I'm going to be kicking things off with how you can use Microsoft's OneNote with SharePoint. 

I had originally intended to do that in this post, but I went into the whole preface for this theme a little more than I expected, so I'm going to wrap it up and devote the whole post to OneNote and SharePoint.

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.

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

As you may have noticed in the last couple of months or so, I've been posting new blog entries with less and less frequency.  The good news that I'm fine, my family's fine, nothing's gone wrong (knock on wood) that has prevented me from regularly updating the blog like I wanted.  The bad news is that I'm probably going to continue posting haphazardly on a reduced schedule for the next several months, due to the fact that the majority of my writing energies are being devoted to another project: the "SharePoint 2007 Disaster Recovery Guide."

Becky Isserman (aka MOSSLover) was awesome enough to invite me to co-author this book with her, and we've been furiously scribbling away as we work to put together a useful and thorough resource on how to preserve and restore your SharePoint environment in the event of a calamity.  It's definitely been a learning experience for me; as a first-time author I have a whole new appreciation for everyone out there who has written a technical book before.

As you can see, the entry for the book is up on Amazon already, although we've slightly tweaked the title recently to better reflect how our work is going to encompass the entire SharePoint platform, not just MOSS 2007.  The other cool thing that happened recently is that our publisher has put together a draft of the cover design for the book, and I think it looks pretty sweet.  Between that and the Amazon entry it certainly makes the whole project feel a lot more tangible beyond the boatload of Word documents we're churning out.

And instead of just taunting you with how cool the cover looks, I figured I'd go ahead and put it out there for you to see as well.  Take a look and let me know what you think   And don't forget to bookmark that Amazon page so you can easily check back to it and find out when your pre-ordered copy is due to ship!