How Cloud and Artificial Intelligence Helped Me to Author a Book?

It’s now a bit over one hundred days since the release of my very first technical book, called “Customizing and Extending SharePoint Online”. Since time has passed since the authoring process, now is the time to write an analytical reflection of my learnings.

First, I’m so humble that the book has received extremely good feedback and readers have found it helpful resource for them to understand the capabilities of SharePoint Online. I couldn’t be happier the book has scored 4.7 of 5 in Amazon (26th June 2024).

You can get your paperback or Kindle copy from Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Customizing-Extending-SharePoint-Online-organizations/dp/1803244895

It was a learning journey for me

Once I received the proposal about the book topics Packt, I recall my very first questions being: “Can I truly achieve this? What would it really take? Am I up for it?” Nevertheless, I proceeded to outline the book and soon came to the realization: “I know this, I am familiar with that, I have worked most of my professional career with Sharepoint, so I absolutely have the necessary expertise”. Of course, there were some topics which weren’t so familiar, but I could get some more value for me for learning new things on the way.

Ultimately, I resolved within myself: “Let’s learn what it takes, and just do it!”. I also got strong support from my family, friends and colleagues.

And so, the journey began for me.

No local copies – just cloud

The very first thing for me, like an engineer does, was to equip my toolbelt. Since I have been working with Microsoft cloud services for over 10 years, it was a natural choice to use Microsoft cloud-based tools for book authoring. The whole writing process has been made using my personal Microsoft OneDrive as storage and using only the online version of Microsoft Word as my typewriter.

No local copies or opening desktop apps – is it even possible? Yes, it is! The only times when I needed to download files locally were when transferring chapters to the publisher. All needed functions were available on Word Online, even chapter templating worked fluently.

Did I stuggle in any part of the process? No. Everything worked fluently. Chapters were accessible on any device from anywhere, not needing to keep up with versions.

The Process

The first step was to draft a structure for the book. I got suggestions for the content, parts and chapters. It was clear first going trought the basics like sites and permissions. Next part included basic services like search and managed metadata with addition to Viva Connections and Viva Topics. I actually wrote a chapter about Viva Topics, but since Microsoft announced deprecation of the service in the last meters, it was dropped from the final version. Next part as the introduction to Power Platform and SharePoint’s out-of-the-box capabilities to extend SharePoint. And the final part contained SharePoint Framework, Microsoft Graph and presenting valuable community solutions.

While I was drafting the structure I also started putting down ideas for the content, examples and important source links. This was also helpful when starting a new chapter, I got the first draft coming along quite quickly.

The writing itself was mostly fun. I have always loved building demos and learning by doing. The most difficult part was to make the text clear and descriptive enough. Luckily, I had a great team from the publisher’s side to back me up, ask important questions and improve my writing. At the start I was too optimistic about how much I could get done, but learned on the way that this is the amount I can accomplish. The most rewarding thing was when I started realizing that my language, writing style and grammar started to improve towards the end – so I really have learned something valuable.

How AI Have Helped Me Along the Way?

First, ChatGPT and Copilot didn’t draft this book for me, but were valuable tools along the way. Here are some of my findings where ChatGPT and later Microsoft Copilot were helpful.

Blank Canvas Syndrome

We all have been there. Blank white paper staring at us, hands on the keyboard, but nothing is happening. From time to time, I was struggling with how to start a chapter or a section of the book. I used AI tools to draft me some ideas of the topic, for example “Write a three-paragraph introduction to a book about SharePoint permissions. Make five different versions for me. Book audience is technical.”. That gave me ideas about the structure and wording, the very first version which I then altered to match the actual written content. I learned that quite usually AI started to list things as bullet lists rather writing complete sentences.

Rephrasing Text

Sometimes when writing a paragraph of a complex topic, the text started to feel like “Rally English” (common Finnish term for quite bad English) for me. I pasted the written text to Copilot and asked it to rephrase it with couple of different versions, and used those construct the final text. I noticed that I started writing better-structured sentences along the way, and learned lost of new words and phrases. I guess, rephrasing was the most useful tool for me for improving my writing skills.

Translating Ideas

Sometimes explaining a topic in your native language is just more fluent. So, I just Copilot to translate these ideas to English. I also usually used rephrasing together with this to improve the text and my idea as well.

Finding Information

Using ChatGPT and Copilot as search engines sped up things. I could ask a question about a topic using natural language and get the detailed answer with explanation. And if I needed more details, I could just continue the conversation. Of course, I used traditional search engines as well when I knew the exact article or specific detail I was looking for.

Setting Professional Tone

I used Microsoft Editor, which is integrated in Microsoft Word to adjust the tone of the content sound like professional. It also helped me with grammar and structuring sentences, and most of all, remove meaningless words. Towards the end I started to get rid off meaningless filler words, and use more common professional terms for certain things.

My Learnings and Tips

First, be merciful to yourself, especially if you are doing this as a sidetrack, have a family, work and life. Spend time with your family and don’t try to use your weekends and vacation times completely for writing. It’s really important to relax and enjoy life as well. This really hit me after the first vacation week.

If I were now starting the process, I’d take two weeks’ time off and get as much done. Now I feel I could have done quite a big part of the content just by focusing for a couple of weeks completely.

Don’t try to push it. I found myself sometimes just sitting on a computer and building Spotify playlists to got into the writing mode – didn’t really work. You cannot enforce the flow.

Reviewer comments are valuable. With a couple of chapters, it felt that I can’t get these done, comments stating: add this, fix that and that doesn’t sound right, just keeped on coming – those are not to make you feel bad, but to improve your text and make it better for readers. Once I got those difficult ones done, I could say the comments improved the content a lot.

Meet more frequently with your publishing team. You gain valuable feedback and you can also adjust the plan and schedule with the team, if needed.

It’s done!

What a great feeling when you submit the final review of the very final chapter. Now it’s done. And even better when you get a physical copy to hold in your hands. You really made it! I can now call myself a book author.

Thank you!

First, my family – thank you for supporting and believing in me.

Friends and colleagues, thank you for the encouragement! I really value it.

Packt’s publishing team for supporting, pushing, and encouraging me along the way. Thank you for your valuable input and comments, which really helped me to get through this.

Technical reviewers who helped me to improve and get better. Your input was very valuable for me and especially for the readers.