Inside the Microsoft Operations Management Suite Book Landed on Amazon

Some time last year, when my good friend and fellow CDM MVP Pete Zerger (@pzerger) asked myself and another good friend &  fellow CDM MVP Stanislav Zhelyazkov (@StanZhelyazkov) to join him and Microsoft Principal PFE Anders Bengtsson (http://contoso.se/blog/) on this OMS book project, Stan and I said yes without hesitation. after few months of hard work, we managed to release this book as a free ebook on TechNet Gallery just after new year. To date, this ebook has been downloaded over 6,300 times on TechNet – in just a little over 2 months!

After the book was released on TechNet Gallery, Pete actually has spent A LOT of time working with professional editors in order to publish this book on Amazon. Few weeks ago, this book was released on Amazon as a Kindle ebook.

Yesterday, Pete pinged me and told me the paperback book has also been released on Amazon. Pete has already ordered a copy and sanity checked – making sure the print quality is up to standard.

If you’d like to order a printed copy, you can get it here: http://www.amazon.com/Inside-Microsoft-Operations-Management-Hands–ebook/dp/B01CH1L9X6

Pete told me once you have ordered the printed paperback copy, the Kindle ebook should be free of charge.

We have set the price as low as possible on Amazon. We originally want to make the Kindle ebook free but Amazon does not allow free ebooks anymore. Our intention is not about making money from this book, but we are hoping the revenue from Amazon can offset some of the cost Pete has paid for professional editors.

I’d like to than all my co-authors – Pete, Stan and Anders. It has been a very pleasant experience, and I am sure we have learned a lot from each other during authoring and reviewing others chapters (at least I felt this way). It was fun reviewing Stan’s monster Azure Automation chapter (over 100 pages) multiple times, and working with Anders, whom I’ve only heard many good things about but never met in person.

I especially would like to thank Pete for all his effort, this would have not been done without Pete. Pete is like the glue that brought all of us together (like a Project Manager) and the one who spent most of the effort (reviewing, dealing with editors, Amazon, etc.). When Pete was working with editors and trying to get it on Amazon, I would go to Amazon and search “Pete Zerger” every day – to see if the book has been published. Interestingly, one day, I found this T-Shirt on Amazon:

This is exactly how I feel as Pete has handled everything for us!

We have already started gathering information for the next update of this book. Due to the rapid development and release cycles from the OMS product team, our to-do list for v2 of the book is getting longer and longer! So stay tuned, we are likely to start working on v2 very soon.