Category Archives: General Stuff

Microsoft is changing the way they distribute security bulletins. In the past, they’ve blasted out fairly technical bulletins to all subscribers, including the home users and other non-administrator types who took my advice and signed up for the bulletin service. It’s a litte daunting when Mom gets a security bulletin for Exchange 2000!
To make it easier for everyone to find out what’s what, their new process is a bit different:

• The existing technical bulletins stay around, but they’re now targeted at administrators, not end users
• In the future, new bulletins for end-user issues (like patches for IE or Office) will be released. These will be less technical, with links to more info on the MS web site.
• The rating system for vulnerabilities has changed. Since someone else already has a monopoly on color codes, Microsoft’s using a scale ranging from “critical” to “low”.

I’m always a little leery of technical editors, because I know how most publishers choose them: they look for someone who a) is breathing and b) can spell the name of the product or technology covered in the book. I’m fortunate that MS Press chose Tony Northrup as their TE for this book; his comments have uniformly been useful (even when I didn’t agree with them), and he’s caught a bunch of my stupid mistakes before they got out into the wild.
There are a number of volunteer TEs, too, whom I’ll be introducing over the coming weeks. In particular, a number of Microsoft PMs have volunteered to review material related to their domain expertise, which is really helping strengthen coverage of some key areas.

I basically have three weeks to finish the book. The first 10 chapters are all done and delivered to Microsoft; 9 of them have already been through author review. A total of six chapters have yet to be written, so I’ve got my work cut out for me. (Actually, one of those 6– the one on POP/IMAP security– is all done but for the chapter summary.)
Indexing, proofreading, and printing usually takes about 12 weeks for most publishers. This is my first MS Press book, so I don’t know if they’re faster or slower than average. As soon as I have more information on an ETA for the book, I’ll post it here (although it’s not showing up on Amazon.com yet).