Mike, you’ve been a SharePoint MVP for a long time. Why haven’t you written a book before?

There are a couple of reasons. Firstly I never thought of it and secondly no one asked me - at least not until fairly recently. As you probably know I was one of the MVPs who combined to write a book for Wrox (Real World SharePoint 2007) but that came about because another MVP had put the idea of such a book to Wrox and he’d then asked for volunteers to write a chapter each on something they felt happy about writing about. So I wrote the introduction!
After that I was asked a couple of times to comment on book submissions by other people so it finally got into my head that you didn’t actually have to wait to be asked but that you could think of a title and a set of chapters and then suggest such a book to a publisher. I didn’t of course.
Then I was asked a couple of times, but once it was a very general “please let us know if you have an idea for a book” and the other time it was an offer to be a co-author of a book about an aspect of SharePoint I didn’t know much about, so that didn’t seem in the end to be a particularly good idea either.
But then I was offered the Teach Yourself book and that not only was a ready-made subject area but one (WSS 3.0) I thought I knew enough about to be able to write a whole book about.

So you just started writing?

No actually my first reaction was to say that we were a bit late in the production cycle of the SharePoint v3 products so shouldn’t we put it off until v4 … but I was told (probably correctly as you may have noticed that books are now being written timed to come out up to six months after mine) that there still was a market for a good book.
So I decided that if the book is going to come out later than quite a lot of others, it had better include lots of things which weren’t available to those earlier writers. So it’s based on Service Pack 1 code; has an appendix on installing WSS 3.0 in Windows Server 2008 (moved later with the other appendices to the book’s web site); and includes things like Search Server 2008; the “Fantastic 40″ templates and various web parts and so on that weren’t available at the release of WSS 3.0.
Anyway I’m getting ahead of myself. Even if I had been invited to write the book, the first task I had was still to provide chapter titles so that they could have some hope that the book would both match the aims of the series and also be written. As the title is “in 24 Hours” that meant writing the titles of 24 chapters. I would imagine that about half of those have survived in the final book because it’s only when you are writing that you notice that you need more (usually you need more) space than one ca. 20 page chapter gives you so you need two or even three (and less often you notice that you don’t really have enough to talk about of any value to fill a full chapter so you maybe combine two into one).
After that set of chapter titles was approved, contracts were exchanged where I would hand over 6 chapters by date X; the next 6 by date Y etc. These were tough deadlines but I made them!

Tell us something about writing the book and what is in it.

Many SharePoint books are written by two or more people and I suspect that means that they are writing chapters at the same time and need to be aware of what the other person has written.
Because I was the sole author I was able to write the book entirely in the order it appears in the printed version. So it starts with an introduction chapter (completely different to the Wrox chapter I’d written a year earlier); goes on to install the product and then spends roughly a third of the book using that installation to go into basic usage and administration before closing that section of the book with a real-life example of how you would put together the bits and pieces the reader has learned so far.
I spent a lot of time thinking about which real-life solution I should pick and in the end decided that most people have at one time or another watched a TV show about a major crime investigation, so I’d use that. It means I don’t have to explain the background yet it gives the opportunity to use all kinds of lists and libraries and also have different sites and different access rights.
I’m quite happy with the result. It gives, I hope, a clear picture of the sort of things you need to think about when creating SharePoint sites for any kind of a customer or private requirement.
The next set of chapters is about the interaction of Office and WSS 3.0. There I’ve made a point of not assuming - as the Microsoft books often seem to do - that people will be using Office 2007 but also show the interaction with the equivalent Office 2003 products.
The only exception to that is Access 2007 (and not Access 2003) because I’d earlier noticed that although Microsoft expects people to use that for reports of SharePoint lists, nobody seems to have written about it much. So I have one chapter where I show how Access 2007 (and OneNote 2007 - something which also doesn’t seem to be covered elsewhere) work with WSS 3.0 but I also have a second chapter where I show how to create reports from both single WSS 3.0 lists (using a wizard) and from multi WSS 3.0 lists (NOT using a wizard!).
I have a couple of chapters on Search Server 2008 both installing and then using it on top of WSS 3.0. That includes how you can amend the standard WSS 3.0 search box so that it becomes a Search Server 2008 Advanced search box.
Then I have a couple of chapters on workflow. The first looks at the different kinds of workflows you can have in connection with the SharePoint v3 products before going on to specifically create a standard WSS 3.0 workflow and the second then looks in detail at a SharePoint Designer 2007 workflow.
I then have a couple of more SPD 2007 related chapters - one about creating DataView web parts and the next as part of a chapter on how the end-user and site (rather than system) administrator can make safety copies of his data. This includes backup/Restore information but before that mentions simpler methods such as “Save List as Template”.
Finally there are some chapters on using ready-made templates ; on using language packs and on using third-party web parts (both free and commercial).

It seems to cover a lot of ground. Is there anything you don’t write about?

There’s nothing in the book about developing own code. For that I recommend one of the many developer books out there.
This is a book about using what Microsoft provide - either in the product itself or in combination with other “free products” (Search Server 2008 Express; application templates; language packs, web parts) or with SharePoint Designer 2007 or Office 2003/2007.
The other thing you may have noticed above is that the SPD 2007 chapters don’t include a chapter on amending the look and feel of your site. I couldn’t do justification to that in a single chapter and there are any specialist books on SPD 2007 that people should read if they are planning to change the look of their site(s) so radically that they need advice on how to do it. Instead I concentrate if you like on the technical areas of SPD 2007 usage.

Your book is less than 500 pages long, how did you fit this breadth of content in it?

A: It all comes down to writing style and assumptions made about your readers. I assumed that my readers would prefer to be given introductions into the whole range of options for a WSS 3.0 installation rather than being spoon-fed a massive amount of detail on a limited range of subjects.
So, for instance, when I work through Lists and Libraries, I use in my examples only the few different field types I mostly use rather than going into details about every single field type. This means that the book retains its relevance to real life and keeps moving forward (and I hope retains the interest of its readers rather than boring them with too much detail - they can investigate the other field types by themselves later).
Another thing I try to do is to not over-complicate the examples so I don’t need to spend time explaining the aim of the example. This doesn’t mean that the examples aren’t representative of real-life needs but it does mean that for instance the Access reports I create are built using a couple of easily-understandable lists.

Is there anything you are particularly proud of in the book?

I’m actually proud of a part of a chapter that has been moved to the web site because it was regarded as being a bit beyond the scope of the book.
When you write about SPD 2007 Data View Web parts, it’s very easy to just show the sunny side and quickly knock off a web part where for instance a field is in red if sales are too low. So, while I have that show-off stuff too, when I wrote the chapter on Data View web parts I started off with a list of requirements that I thought a typical boss would demand.
As I started working through those requirements, everything went smoothly until I found that, using the user interface, it was impossible to solve one of them. Instead it would be necessary to write code.
Now what I could have done would have been to go back in the chapter and simply remove that requirement. Yet - and this is what I am proud of - despite a rapidly-approaching time-limit, I spent the next couple of days learning more than I wanted to about XSLT and XPath and finally with the help of a fellow SharePoint MVP found the exact code I needed to solve that requirement too.
So now people reading the book will first see a seemingly reasonable list of requirements; see how to solve most of them quickly and easily and yet will be aware that not everything that looks easy to solve is and that if they get a request from their boss they should build in an extra couple of days just in case.
The printed chapter in the final version satisfies most of the requirements (and ends with that warning!). The final requirement from the list of requirements is then covered in a page on the book’s web site that carries on where the written chapter leaves off.

Finally, Mike, the book title says “SharePoint 2007: Using Windows SharePoint Services 3.0″. Throughout this interview you’ve been talking about WSS 3.0. Should people using or planning to use MOSS 2007 not bother reading your book?

It IS a book about WSS 3.0 but at the same time I’ve always thought that anyone who will be using MOSS is well advised to learn about the basics by running WSS 3.0. I’ve thought that for many years so it’s nothing new that I’ve just put in to sell more copies of the book - I really do think that is the best approach. MOSS itself includes so much functionality it must be terribly difficult to learn SharePoint on a MOSS system - far better to start on WSS 3.0 and then work your way up.
So, yes, people new to the SharePoint products can certainly gain benefit from the book even if they later are involved with MOSS-based sites. As you know, virtually everything you can do in a WSS 3.0 system can be done in a MOSS system in just the same way, so there’s very little knowledge gained from reading the book that will be lost on moving to MOSS - mainly just the installation details in fact.
The other thing is that almost all the new (and possibly unique) content in the second half of the book both applies to MOSS and also might well be new to existing MOSS users. To take one example I’ve not mentioned before, the built-in Blog system is the same in both WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 and isn’t particularly good. So I’ve described in the book how to install and use the “Extended Blog Edition” which is part of the free Community SharePoint Kit.