I am pleased to report that after 18 months work the VMware View book I have been working with alongside co-author Mike Laverick has now been released.

I originally embarked on this project after Mike Laverick released his original View 4.5 authors edition manuscript, Mike was looking for someone to update it to View 4.6 whilst he was working on his SRM book, being up for a challenge I volunteered having never attempted to write a book before. Back then I never thought a year and a half later we would just be finishing.

This was for a number of reasons, initially my home lab was a big weakness when trying to run multiple desktops, causing many problems, after many upgrades I was finally in a lot better position to complete the content. Secondly trying to write a technical book and beat the manufacturers release schedule proved very difficult, with the View 4.6 book quick turning into a View 5.0 book and finally View 5.1, each time there was a new release the whole content of the book needed reviewing, each procedure recreating, screenshots retaking etc. Thirdly Mike and I had a very good catchup at VMworld Europe last year to discuss the book and agreed to add a lot more content than the previous manuscript contained, the result of this is a 188 page manuscript has now turned into a 559 page book, the final book also contains many other end user computing technologies such as ThinApp, Horizon Application Manager and ThinApp Factory. Lastly I have to thank my ever patient wife Laura as not only have I been working on the book with Mike over the last year and half, I have got married and moved house, this teamed by only being able to work on the book in my evenings and weekends meant progress wasn’t as quick as I would have liked to at times and Laura was very understanding allowing me to prioritise the book on a number of occasions.

Anyway excuses over I have to thank Mike Laverick for giving me the opportunity of working with him on this project, it has certainly opened my eyes to the work involved in creating a technical book, Mike was certainly good at getting me to refocus, I think for both of us if it was an individual project we may have let it goto the wayside at some point.

We’d both like to take this opportunity to thank everyone one who has assisted in bringing this text to the Community.

From VMware would like to thank – Spencer Pitts, Peter von Oven, Peter Björk, Christoph Harding and Matthew Northam. Additionally I would like to thank Aaron Black, Jared Cook, Alejandro Guzman, Alan LaMielle and Deam Flaming who helped greatly with the ThinApp Factory and Horizon Application Manager chapters.

We would also like to thank Paul Pindel of F5 Networks, Andrei Valentin of BitDefender and Elcio Mello of Teradici.

Finally, we would like to thank all the people in the vExperts Community and elsewhere who assisted in the review process including: Duco Jaspars, Gabrie Van Zantan, Chris Mohn, Jonathan Medd, Rick Al Eqesem, Bas Raayman, Jane Rimmer, Stu McHugh, Ivo Beerens, Chris Deardon, Bilal Hashmi, James Bowling, Brian Jordon, Shane Williford, Andrew Hancock, Brian Suhr, Alex Muetstege, Dan Berkowitz, Matt Murray, Ryan Makamson, Julian Wood, Tim Myers, Matthew Northam, Alan Renouf, Michael Letschin and Kong L. Yang.

As special thanks goes to  Christian Mohn who wrote the forward to the book.

Due to time restraints mainly on my side we decided we wanted to self publish rather than take up an offer from a publisher, so for now the book is only available from LULU, to either be downloaded or as a hardcopy , with all royalties going to UNICEF as a charitable donation after 1 year. When I originally purchased Mike’s authors edition manuscript this was largely because he was donating the money to charity as well as the content, so when Mike asked me if I was happy to do this again I was more than happy to continue in this vein.

As Mike is taking up a new role this is going to be his last book in a while, but when View .next appears I maybe looking for help from the community to upgrade the content to the new version. Mike and I have had numerous conversations about the book writing process and both agree that some kind of online community project maybe the way we want to take this kind of content, this will allow us to speed up the process and keep ahead of the curve of the technology. With the frequency of updates in the industry today printed material becomes very quickly outdated, so an online version of some kind seems to make sense, I will be looking into ways of doing this over the coming months.

Lastly from me, the experience has certainly been an eye opener, I am looking forward to having at least a couple of months off from book work to catchup with some DIY on the new house and also put some focus back onto my blog and podcast. But I can definitely see me tackling something like this again, I did find the process of reviewing someone else’s work, trying to recreate exactly and up date a difficult task and very time consuming but creating the new content was very enjoyable and actually a lot quicker than the chapters that needed updating. So maybe the correct answer would have been to start from scratch with only the headers to work from.

If you would like to download an electronic please head over to LULU at the link below. The hard copy should be available in a few weeks