Exchange 2013 Inside Out appears on Amazon

The wheels of the publishing market turn in mysterious ways. At least, their ways are mysterious to those who don’t publish books, including the authors who actually write the text. Earlier this month I let you know that O’Reilly will soon release draft chapters of my book Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 Inside Out: Mailbox and High Availability. These are chapters that have been through a copy edit and technical review, but are still not quite finished for various reasons. For example, some questions to the development group might not have been answered or we are simply waiting for the next cumulative update to appear to see what it might bring.

O’Reilly will also make some draft chapters available for the companion book, Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 Inside Out: Connectivity, Clients, and UM, by Paul Robichaux. Paul has been teaching the Unified Messaging component of the Exchange Ranger training class for many years so it should come as no surprise that this book contains the best discussion about the topic that I have ever seen. For the record, to keep everyone honest, Paul is doing the technical edit for my book and I am doing the same for his. Apart from anything else, this arrangement makes sure that we see the content and make sure that there’s no overlap or duplication across the two books.

Getting back to the mysterious ways, it seems strange that Amazon has now published the availability of both books in their online store some six months before the final pages are printed. That being said, please do check out Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 Inside Out: Mailbox and High Availability and Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 Inside Out: Connectivity, Clients, and UM. Paul has already commented that he can’t understand why Amazon has priced his book at $30.85 while mine costs $34.07. Apart from the obvious retort that mine is much more interesting than his (well, about $3.22 more interesting), Paul’s book is 600 pages while mine is 800. You definitely get more pages for your dollar with me while each of Paul’s pages contains premium content. Or something like that.

Given that we essentially have books ready, why wait until the October 22, 2013 date promised by Amazon? Well, we could rush the books out and have them available in the near future, but that removes the chance of learning just how Exchange 2013 actually functions in real deployments. Every day we learn more about the quirks of the product and these are the important facts that become the “inside out” referred to in the title.

In addition, Microsoft has a habit of updating the way that Exchange works as a version matures. We have already seen updates (such as the reintroduced ability for groups to manage groups) in Exchange 2013 CU1 and more are likely as CU2 and CU3 appear over the coming months. We want to track and report on these changes, insofar as is possible.

Hopefully you will enjoy the books. At least, that’s the plan.

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