Paul's Down-Home Page

Clearly the only way I will be able to get a word in before Tony is to write about each day before it starts!

I arrived last night in Anaheim after a long (and expensive!) cab ride from LAX, preceded by a flight on Horizon from SJC. We were on a Bombardier Q400, which I’d never flown before. It’s a turboprop, but feels inside like a CRJ-class jet. It was not uncomfortable, and it wasn’t too noisy, so I’ll score that as a win.

The hotel assigned me to an absolutely huge guest room overlooking the pool. Given that it’s in the mid-60s, this is not the benefit you might assume. I was a bit startled to hear a series of loud boom! sounds starting about 9:30. This turned out to be the nightly Disneyland fireworks show; apparently the launch area is close by the hotel. Sadly, I couldn’t see the actual fireworks, but I’ll try to find a better vantage point tonight.

The hotel meeting facilities are about a million times nicer than the Doubletree we used in Boston. I was greeted this morning with a spacious, well-lit room, with a proper whiteboard. The entire corner of the room is occupied by a rather grand buffet of breakfast choices, which I appreciate; I love a good breakfast.

Today we have about 30 attendees, including my friend and former 3Sharpie Alice Goodman. Tony and I have been busy updating our slides to reflect feedback from the Boston attendees, and Brian has done a superb job of updating the lab instructions. The largest change is that the session on remote PowerShell has been removed, and its material integrated with the sessions on Exchange management tools and RBAC. There’s no reduction in the material covered; it’s just been reorganized to make things flow better.

The biggest piece of feedback from Boston is one we can’t do anything about; sadly there’s nothing we can do to make the labs any faster. We are trying to figure out a cost-effective way to help future attendees get SSDs to use with the labs. Their increased speed would help a great deal.

Now I’m off to finish my breakfast and get my game face on for another big day!

We wrapped up the Boston Exchange Maestro event today, and it was quite good! (Except that I had hoped to finish my summary before Tony got his writeup done… perhaps I’ll have better luck next time.)

Tony kicked the morning off with an optional 8am session on migration considerations. As much of the class is still on Exchange 2003, this was well-attended. There’s a wide variety of environments out there, and I enjoyed hearing the attendees’ specific questions about exactly how to accomplish specific tasks in their environment.

I then gave a longer-than-expected presentation on Exchange scalability. It took more than the 90 minutes I’d allotted, and there were still many areas of the topic that I didn’t get to delve into. In particular, I would like to have enough time to walk through more of the details of the Exchange 2010 mailbox role storage calculator. There’s way more there than I can cover in such a limited amount of time, though we did have some interesting discussions around storage provisioning.

The high point of the day was our group work. Tony, playing the role of a hard-nosed corporate CIO, gave the attendees a high-level description of an Exchange 2003 environment with 12,000 users and a simple set of requirements. Their task was to break into groups and develop high-level designs, then present them. We were joined by two consultants from HP’s services organization who circulated around and helped the groups identify the key points required for their designs. At the end of an hour, Tony and I had the attendees mail us their presentations, then I chose three teams to present their designs for Tony’s scrutiny. Our presenters showed a great deal of mental agility in answering Tony’s sometimes-pointed questions.

The low point of the day was finding a live roach in my sandwich. As Tony points out, this can indeed happen at almost any hotel; however, we had a long string of problems here, ranging from noisy construction work during our classes (which Melissa quickly stopped) to numerous A/V problems to getting kicked out of the room earlier than we’d planned. This sort of thing does happen from time to time, but I think and expect that we’ll have better luck in Anaheim.

One of the most valuable things about this training is that we’re trying to move the emphasis away from the purely technical. The general level of training for Exchange is fairly low: the official Microsoft curriculum is too limited, and the variance in instructor quality too great. We wanted to deliver training with more technical depth and an exploration of the business issues behind Exchange 2010 deployment. I feel like we did that here, and we’re both looking for opportunities to sharpen that message in our future events.

Tomorrow I have an early-morning flight back to San Jose, where I’m looking forward to spending some time with the boys. Sunday night I head down to Anaheim for our next event, which I’m looking forward to quite a bit.

Tony beat me to it; while I was presenting during the latter portion of the day (and, I admit, catching up on e-mail) he was busy writing an excellent summary of our first day of the Exchange Maestro workshop here in Boston. As he pointed out, timing was one of the key issues that we had to struggle with. For events like this, there is always a tension between the amount of time you would like to have and the amount of time you do have. Exchange 2010 is complicated enough that we could easily, and very productively, spend a full week covering the topics we’ve selected for this three-day event. I feel that we have done a good job sticking to the schedule and managing our time well, but there’s so much material to cover that staying on the schedule can sometimes be challenging

Tony pointed out a couple of minor issues with the venue: for one thing, we got thrown out about 90 min. sooner than I thought we should have. Furthermore, during the morning, we were serenaded by the sounds of an ongoing bathroom renovation, complete with the dulcet tones of a reciprocating saw, some kind of rotary hammer, and other percussive power tools. Now, don’t get me wrong: I am a huge power tool fan and use them every chance I get. However, it’s fair to say that they were not the ideal accompaniment for our technical material. Fortunately, the hotel paused construction, and we will be moving to a different room for tomorrow and Friday– hopefully one with less ambient noise.

The attendees were engaged in asking questions, and they stayed busy with the labs. Tomorrow morning first thing I will be presenting on RBAC, a difficult topic to begin the day with. Hopefully the attendees will come with bright eyes and at peak alertness; they will need it. After RBAC, Tony will present on the mailbox replication service, followed by my presentation on the Exchange transport core. Rounding out the day, Tony will cover the retention and compliance aspects of Exchange 2010. That will be unknown territory for most of our attendees, so I expect that we all will be enlightened by the resulting discussions.

I would be remiss if I failed to point out the important contributions that Brian made during the day. In addition to making sure that the labs went smoothly, he made a number of very helpful suggestions about how we can better streamline the material to fit the allotted time, as well as catching a number of minor mistakes in our slide decks and accompanying presentations. It’s been great to have him here!

One thing that Tony failed to mention about today’s sessions is that he continually gave me a hard time about my progress (or lack thereof) in finishing the technical edits for his book. Don’t tell him, but I’m going to go work on it now so that I can finish it and avoid further harassment.

Update (12 Dec 2010): The book is now available from Amazon in both paper and Kindle editions.

As regular readers of this blog may know, I have been working on a number of Exchange related projects over the last few months. Two of them involve the world-famous and internationally known Tony Redmond, late of Hewlett-Packard, noted raconteur, and all-around Exchange expert.

First, and coming soonest, is our upcoming two-city Exchange Maestro roadshow. Tony and I are sharing teaching duties in these three day classes. Brian Desmond, a fellow Exchange MVP and expert, is acting as our lab master. I have lately been quite busy creating the content for my portion of the presentation. My topics include unified messaging (of course!), role-based access control, remote PowerShell, and the ins and outs of the client access server role. Our first event is practically right around the corner, coming as it does in about three weeks. For more details, see the event website– it’s not too late to register.

I have also been busy performing the technical edit on Tony’s forthcoming book, Exchange 2010 Inside Out. When Microsoft press first approached me about doing the technical edit, I was hesitant. Tony’s books are legendary for the quality of their content, their information density, and their sheer page count. The thought of being responsible for the technical quality of such a large work was daunting. However, it was also a wonderful opportunity to work with someone whose knowledge and abilities I very much respect, as well as to get a toe back into the book publishing world. It has been quite an adventure so far.

The workflow we follow is fairly simple. First, Tony writes a chapter. Then it goes through a copyedit. The copy editor is responsible for making sure that the manuscript follows the Microsoft style guide for punctuation, capitalization, and avoidance of various other pitfalls, traps, and general badness. For example, the Microsoft press folks have insisted that Tony remove any reference to his favorite imaginary spam website, “sexybabes.com”. Apparently, Microsoft has run afoul of officials in various countries throughout the world for using similar names. Anyway, after the copy editor has worked magic on the manuscript, it comes to me for the first technical edit pass.

My job is to read through Tony’s work, checking it for accuracy, completeness, and consistency. For example if in one chapter, Tony says that an Exchange feature works in a particular way, and he speaks about it differently in a later chapter, I’m supposed to catch that. I am also in charge of catching mismatches between PowerShell commands and their descriptions, making sure that PoSh commands work properly as printed, and in general ensuring that there are as few technical mistakes as possible in the book.

The fun part of this job is that I also get to suggest to Tony areas where the coverage in the book might be improved or clarified. He has been quite generous in listening to my suggestions instead of telling me to shut my pie hole. (In fact, I am not sure that Tony knows the expression “shut your pie hole”. I fear that I may have accidentally educated him by this blog post.)

When I’m done, I post the chapter back to the SharePoint site that we use, then Tony gets another crack at it. He has to resolve each of the embedded comments or questions generated by the copy editor, me, or the project editor. Once he has done all these things, he resubmits an updated draft of the chapter, and I get it again for a second technical review pass.

Because Tony’s book covers Exchange 2010 service pack 1, there have been a number of cases where changes in the service pack code during its lifecycle have resulted in the need to add or remove or change material during the second tech edit pass luckily, Microsoft shipped SP1 early so we have had access to the final version for some time, making it possible to ensure that we cover the service pack as it actually ships and not as it was projected to ship in earlier days.

After Tony’s done with his second pass, the copy editor may get another crack at the chapter, depending on what state it’s in. After that, the production staff takes over and turns the original Microsoft Word document into a print ready set up page proofs, which Tony then gets to review and check for last-minute changes. By the time the chapter “goes to pages” it is expensive and difficult to make changes. Imagine, if you will, making a change on page 172 of an 800-page book and having that change ripple through the rest of the book. It’s not impossible, but the production staff strongly prefers that we make any necessary changes before getting to pages, which is why we have multiple editing passes earlier in the process.

I expect that the book will be done before Thanksgiving. The last time I wrote an actual print book, it took 10 to 12 weeks between the time I had finished everything I had to do and the appearance of the finished book on bookstore shelves. Much of this is because there are only a small number of places in the world they can print actual books in that size and with that page count. That means that, as with many other processes that require a long lead time, there is a great deal of pressure to stick to the schedule. Even if you finish the book early, that’s no guarantee that you can still get press time. Then there is all sorts of other tiresome processing that has to go on: the cover must be printed, the pages and cover must be bound together, the finished book must be boxed and shipped to distributors, who then ship it to buyers’ warehouses, who then eventually ship it to local outlets.

One of the key advantages of this book is that it covers service pack 1. Microsoft made a great number of changes to Exchange with SP1. Some are functional improvements, some are new features, and some are restoration of features or capabilities that were in Exchange 2007 but were cut in Exchange 2010. For that reason-currency-I would have to recommend this book, but I will freely admit that it is not for everyone. Tony is assumed a fair amount of Exchange knowledge on the part of the reader. This is not really an appropriate book for beginners. That is not to say that a motivated beginner couldn’t learn from it, merely that an introductory book like McBee’s Mastering, is a better choice for someone who’s just starting out. I think there’s room in the marketplace for more than one good Exchange book, and I am delighted to have had a hand in this one’s production.