What we did over our summer vacation

We've been very fortunate that the last several months have been unusually busy for us - in fact, almost too busy. We've been active in a number of interesting and demanding customer projects, and have invented some very powerful and useful technology along the way which we'll have more to say about over the next month or two.

However, it's time for us to formally come clean about the thing that really took up our evenings and weekends for most of the last year: 'the book'.  Since early last year, we've been working on a book project with Jeff Friend (Microsoft) and Natalya Voskresenskaya (Acrovis). The book, Advanced Microsoft Search: FAST Search, SharePoint Search, and Search Server, is finally available. The ISBN number is 0470584661 and you can order it from Amazon today.

A few good friends have known of the book for a few months now, and while we all felt we finished the book in record time, we're sure it seemed like geologic time to our editors and some potential readers. And I'd be remiss if I did not give special thanks for John Kane (HP), Carl Grimm (Avanade), and Jason Noble (Neudesic) for their roles as technical reviewers.

We cover the entire Microsoft search family with technical coverage on both the SharePoint and the ESP product families. We also have a few chapters on the business side of search: Centers of excellence, operations, selection, and so forth. We even have chapters that deal with ESP under Linux, possibly a first for a Microsoft search book!

We invite you to have a look at our work; and let us know how we did. It took me 20 years to forget what a time sink it is to write a book; and yet now that it's done, we're already talking of a fourth. I guess my memory isn't what it used to be!

Enjoy!

/s/Miles