Errata on Mastering WSS 3.0

The book is not yet out and I am finding little things that bother me about the it.

Now mind you, I did not write the book alone. I had numerous editors, both to proof the words and to check the technical accuracy. To add to the madness, I had several coauthors, individuals with their own way of saying things.

Together though, that can create some chaos. Let me demonstrate.

• Chapter 14-- For some reason Ron, who had to use the SharePoint installer, SharePoint.exe, to install WSS 3.0; called it "SharePointServices.exe." I don't know why.

• Folders-- folders were mentioned in chapters 5 and 6, but, believe it or not, were going to get serious coverage in chapter 11; which is the chapter about permissions, and is where I feel folders come into their own. However, because of one thing or another, the entire "A good reason to use Folders" sidebar (a good sized chunk of text I might add) was omitted. I will be adding it as an article here for those who might be looking for it.

• Content Types-- I had wanted to do more with content types, I mean, c'mon, I covered connected web parts didn't I? But, due to page constraints I made due with something of a cop-out by covering it to add a template in a library. I will be doing things with content types here that I intended to do in the book. Mind you, I was given to believe there were several other books by Wiley that would cover content types, but as I have never seen them, I am not going to depend on that.

• Sharepoint Designer-- There were supposed to be three chapters about using SharePoint Designer (SD) to customize WSS 3.0 as an IT admin, but they had to be cut out due to time, coauthor issues, and page limits.

• Chapter 11 (written by bill chapman, reworked by charles firth)-- "site groups can be made at the subsite level"-- while technically true could be worded to be more true.~~ I mean that yes, you can use the new group button to add a group and use it at a subsite level if it is not inheriting permissions, but that group is actually in the list for the site collection as if it were created at the top level site. -- That's the point of the groups list for the whole site collection-- to list all the groups in the site collection. That includes those subsites that were created from the start not to inherit and therefore have their own groups. So actually, even if a site group is made at the subsite, it might appear as if it were made at the site collection level. Site groups are just named groups that could contain people, and then the permissions used at a site collection or lower level are applied to the group. So groups can be made anywhere in the site collection hierarchy, it doesn't really matter where. The difference is, there are no permissions being applied to the group at any level but the site that made it (modified it or is using it). See, that's what is really implied with "permission inheritance." ...well, more on that, in detail, later in this blog.

• Server 2008-- Because the book is printing so, super, incredibly late, server 2008 will be out by the time it hits the shelves. The book was entirely written on server 2003. So what does that mean? Well, I could have stopped production and scrapped the book altogether (it was late enough to cancel at this point... one more delay and bam, right in the kisser), but I found that only certain features are different. So instead of scrapping the book, I decided to publish as is, and instead I'll write the changes here.

Those changes are, namely:

• -- IIS 7.0 management. Oh, it says that it supports IIS 6.0, but not really.
• ----IIS Web Sites and Application Pools are backed up and restored differently.
• --Reliability and Performance Monitor.
• ----So creating alerts and logs are going to be different.

I will be rewriting those sections to reflect the step by steps necessary to do those tasks in 2008. As a matter of fact, if I can get time to install camtasia, I'll just demo them. However, keep in mind that, out of a thousand pages, there were very few big differences.

I had to make the decision as to whether to publish or not, and decided to go for it. Please forgive me if that doesn't work for you, and email me to let me know why and what can be done to fix it.

Please, feel free to comment here with other errata (or use the errata email address listed in the errata widget near the top right of this page). I worked really, really hard to make sure everything I said was correct, but as with any project that has many chiefs, unexpected errors can happen. I am serious. I am depending on your to let me know if anything in there is misworded, misnamed, or misleading. I really don't like the idea that anyone might be misinformed by any written material, and always I want to fix it, if possible.

More notes on what I find that might be improved as I find them...

Edited to add More Errata (July 2008):

I was glancing through the book, trying to get ideas for sessions at the EMEA TechEd conference in Barcelona, when I happened to notice a sidebar (pages 347, 348, and 349) called "seeing is Believing." Disregarding the bad layout of the sidebar starting at the very bottom of the initial page, and the fact that the figures could have been shrunk a little to better fit the sidebar, the second figure in the sidebar is incorrect. The sidebar contains two copies of the same picture, when the first one should indicate the library with the "shareadmin" login, and the second picture, which in this book is a repeat, should show "saffron" logged in and the document in question should be missing. Unfortunately, the sidebar makes far less sense with two copies of the same picture than it would if the second picture were correct.

You have my sympathy and apologies if this made no sense to you too. The copy I sent in had the correct pictures listed. It appears that something was lost in translation...

Ah-- found another problem-- on page 251, in the "How to Avoid Blank Date Values, the figure it refers to in "You might have noticed in figure 5.38..." should be figure 5.39. Figure 5.39 displays the list with a record that has a blank Expires field. 5.38 is a picture of an email being used to add an item to the Announcements list.

Since the template the publisher required could not do automatic number, every sequential set of numbers (like figures, step by step lists, etc.) had to manually entered, and updated, every single time there was a change.

Yes, that is painfully ineffective (imagine dealing with it for a thousand pages), but that's the publishing biz for you. So during edits, a figure was added, removed, or moved around, without changing the reference in the text, causing the error. My apologies.