Do We Pay Attention to Reader Ratings?
The Office 365 for IT Pros writing team is a pretty pragmatic bunch, and we don’t spend a heap of time checking if the book receives reviews and ratings. Life’s too short and we have other stuff to do, like checking what’s happening inside the sometimes crazy world of Office 365. All of which explains why we totally failed to notice that the book had accumulated a nice number of five-star ratings on Gumroad. com (where we sell the EPUB/PDF version). In fact, we never knew that Gumroad allowed readers to rate books (Gumroad posted a Twitter update on January 31 to say that ratings was the largest feature they had shipped in a while).
We have a page to record comments we’ve received and do see comments posted on our Facebook page when we post messages there, but checking Amazon for reviews and ratings is not a daily priority, especially has the 2019 edition has received just one rating on Amazon.com and another on Amazon.co.uk. This amuses us because the last edition (2018) received 29 reviews! Clearly we’re not doing something right.
Comments
What we do value enormously are comments from readers that help us find problems or identify topics we need to cover. Broken hyperlinks are the bane of our lives, so it’s great (in an odd way) to hear from someone when they find a bad link. Everyone has an idea about what should be in the book and we like hearing about this too, even if we don’t always agree to include extra content (the book’s pretty big already).
If you have a comment, please use the contact form on this site to tell us. Or if you’re more comfortable with Facebook, post the comment there. Either way, we’ll respond. It is really helpful when you tell us the chapter, heading, or page number where the problem exists and what update you’ve found it in. Remember that we update the book monthly, so a problem in the March 2019 update might not exist in the April 2019 update. That’s one good reason to always download updated files after we release them.
This project has only succeeded (so far) thanks to the support we’ve received from the Office 365 community. Keep on sending those comments to us.
Cute, they don’t even give you an easy option to review the book. Sounded good, real good, so I bought it – not cheap either. Was immediately disappointed with the search in PDF ability; I can google information far more easily, quicker and accurate = for free. I would not recommend purchasing this unless you just want to read current Microsoft theory on what Microsoft interfaces actually work in current day; which we real practitioners already know to be true or not. I would truly see a viable alternative to Microsoft in the everyday business communications application area such as Teams alternative, combined with Office Apps compatible, and Outlook compatible alternative to the incompetent Microsoft offering so far.
Cute, they don’t even give you an easy option to review the book.
TR: You can review the book on Gumroad.com (where you bought your copy).
Sounded good, real good, so I bought it – not cheap either. Was immediately disappointed with the search in PDF ability.
TR: We can’t do much about PDF search. It works the way Adobe designed it to work. However, we haven’t had many people say that they can’t find information through a combination of the table of contents and search. Producing an index is difficult for a 1,250 page book spanning 625,000 words, especially when we change so much every month.
I can google information far more easily, quicker and accurate = for free.
TR: That’s true, and you might get accurate information through a Google search. On the other hand, because things (especially details) change so quickly within Office 365, any blog or post older than a month or so has the potential to miss important details. We post enough on Office365itpros.com to understand the problem of keeping posts updated!
I would not recommend purchasing this unless you just want to read current Microsoft theory on what Microsoft interfaces actually work in current day; which we real practitioners already know to be true or not.
TR: First, I refute the assertion that the book is based on theory. It is based on practice and experience. We update the book content as we learn more about how things really work. Second, we are practitioners. Third, no one person has the knowledge of everything across Office 365, which is why we have a team of practitioners working on the content. None of us work for Microsoft. None of us have an allegiance to Microsoft.
I would truly see a viable alternative to Microsoft in the everyday business communications application area such as Teams alternative, combined
with Office Apps compatible, and Outlook compatible alternative to the incompetent Microsoft offering so far.
TR: Well, that’s a perspective that many people share and it’s valid. Slack is the major competitor to Teams, and it has its own strengths. The advantage Teams has is its integration with the rest of the Microsoft ecosystem. As to Outlook, there are tons of other email clients out there that can connect to Exchange Online. The question is what functionality you get from those clients. IMAP4 is the usual connection protocol and it is limited by its history.