Exchange 2013 Inside Out: Clients, Connectivity, and UM now available

At long last!

Today is officially the release date for Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 Inside Out: Clients, Connectivity, and UM. Because I missed my original deadline, the book was not available at the same time as Tony’s Exchange Server 2013 Inside Out: Mailbox and High Availability, which is a shame since the two books complement each other well. Between the two of them, they cover virtually every important or interesting aspect of Exchange 2013. My book focuses on client access, transport, unified messaging, Lync, and Office 365 integration, which is plenty!

I feel like it’s fair to reprint a section of the acknowledgements from the book here; I owe a great debt to the many people who volunteered their time to read drafts of the manuscript, point out errors, and make suggestions for improvement. As always, they share in the credit for the high quality of the book, and I am solely responsible for errors and shortcomings in it. Many thanks to my posse:

I was incredibly fortunate to receive a great deal of help with this book from a variety of sources. A large group of Exchange experts from the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) and Microsoft Certified Systems Master (MCSM) communities volunteered their time to read early drafts of the chapters as they were produced; their mission was to identify shortcomings or errors and to suggest, based on their own experience, ways in which the book could be improved. This book is much better thanks to their efforts, which I very much appreciate. My thanks to Kamal Abburi, Thierry Demorre, Devin Ganger, Steve Goodman, Todd Hawkins, Georg Hinterhofer, Miha Pihler, Maarten Piederiet, Simon Poirier, Brian Reid, Brian R. Ricks, Jeffrey Rosen, Mitch Roberson, Kay Sellenrode, Bhargav Shukla, Thomas Stensitzki, Richard Timmering, Steven van Houttum, Elias VarVarezis, Johan Veldhuis, and Jerrid Williams. My thanks also go to the broader MCSM and MVP communities, particularly Paul Cunningham, Brian Desmond, and Pat Richard, for discussing topics or sharing scripts that informed the material I wrote.

In addition to these volunteers, I benefited greatly from the efforts of many people from the Exchange, Lync, and Office 365 product teams at Microsoft, including Diego Carlomagno, Bulent Egilmez, David Espinoza, Kern Hardman, Pavani Haridasyam, Tom Kaupe, Roy Kuntz, Lou Mandich, Jon Orton, Tony Smith, Greg Taylor, and Mini Varkey. Extra thanks to Rajesh Jha for taking the time to write the foreword for both books—no easy task considering how often Tony and I have hassled him about various matters.

One thing I can’t explain is the pricing of the two books. For some reason, the Kindle edition of my book is selling at list price, $39.99. The Kindle edition of Tony’s book is discounted, and both the Kindle and print editions of his book are less expensive than the print edition of my book! This is solely due to Amazon’s complex and inscrutable pricing algorithms; it seems unfair since Tony’s book is longer (and probably better written) but there you have it.