After spending the past four months living and breathing the book, it's now almost written and I can soon relax for a bit until the technical reviewer's comments come back and I see how much the text needs to be changed (or not) as a result of the comments. Then, I would guess there's the final run through after the publisher's people have made a book out of it (although I've tried as much as possible to follow their rules on length; content (style) and formatting).

But for now, with 23 out of 24 chapters written and with the final chapter already planned and probably ready by the end of this week, all I have left to do is to read printouts of the final half of the book; correct them off-line (using a pen!) and then enter the corrections into the Word 2003 text (and naturally then hand them all in to the publishers for the technical reviewer to have a go at).

With the short Finnish summer rapidly approaching I won't be short of things to do in my suddenly available spare time.

Meanwhile though, a comment on other SharePoint 2007 books. No, not what you think, no reviews but merely the strange fact that despite me having a vast collection of SharePoint 2007 books, I've during this whole book-writing process done my best to keep them shut. I haven't wanted the text of those books and the way they treat the subjects - which naturally tend to come up in my book too - to affect what I write.

In fact, when I look back, the only subject where I really expected (and looked for) guidance from existing books was workflow but after I searched the indexes of a few and didn't find much (and this was for the basic three stage workflow in WSS 3.0 - one of the specialist SPD 2007 had a good chapter on workflow in that which I did my very best to ignore; while the other SPD 2007 book had nothing at all on workflow [hint the first was the MS Press one]) I just went ahead and spent the time to run through and document the whole process myself. This turned out to be a different approach to the one taken in the one book where I later actually did see something on workflow in WSS 3.0, so it'll be interesting to hear a comparison later.

It's actually not too difficult a process and most of the several days I spent on the chapter were caused by my local (to my server) SMTP server not working as it should and so the e-mails that are part of the 3-stage process weren't going to the people who were supposed to get them. In the end after going back and back and back to working VM snaphots of the WSS 3.0 site, I came to the conclusion that my ISP was only letting my SMTP server work correctly in the first couple of hours of any session because my contract with them doesn't include being allowed to connect a server to the Internet. So they had some routine that dropped me, making the e-mails work and then not work irrespective of my settings for either the workflow or the SMTP server (which is what I was spending far too many hours trying to get correct!).

So now the big question is do I wait to open any other SharePoint books until I've finished that last chapter or until all the review phases are past and there's nothing more I can add or amend?

At the moment I'm thinking the latter although I've just opened a book with a chapter on how to install Forms Server 2007 as that product only rates a very brief mention in my book and the book doesn't have anything (and never will) on how to install it.

Meanwhile I'm still waiting for the price of the book to go down at Amazon and in fact for the other Amazons (apart from Amazon US) to list it. Maybe then there'll be the first pre-order of it via the link in SP 2007 Books page (http://wss.asaris.de/sites/walsh/Lists/WSSv3%20FAQ/V%20Books.aspx)

P.S. I saw yesterday that Patrick Tisseghem's Inside SharePoint 2007 book is now listed in a (Pre-Order still) German translation at Amazon Germany and only last week one of the two books specialising on Search reached released status (with the second one due soon).

Meanwhile on Search, the WSS FAQ now lists 14 web casts on Enterprise Search in MOSS 2007. So maybe you should watch those first and see if you still need a book :)