With the release of Horizon View 6.0, myself and Barry Coombs have decided to close our EUC Book project. The EUC book is now available for free from LULU in a PDF format, and for at-cost price for the hardcopy.
In the end we did two donations of spread over two years (2013 and 2014), as this allowed me to claim a donation from the VMware Foundation. The VMware Foundation is part of the company that allows employees to donate money to worthy causes. That means in total we have raised around $12,835 (give or take currency differences) for UNICEF. I think we actually raised a little less than that in truth, as I personally rounded up the donation amounts to the maximum amount the VMware Foundation matches each year.
We’d like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who supported this project. That includes the likes of F5 Big-IP and BitDefender who provided software and advice. We’d also like to think innumerable members of VMware who helped with questions and answers. But most importantly we’d like thank the folks who bought the book, and helped raise such a good sum for a good cause.
What’s the future of the EUC book now that there is a new release? Well, I have big plans for completely free online delivery of the content (in the great tradition of RTFM) together with a hard-copy version (that will be sold to raise money for UNICEF again) when that’s completed. I’m moving away from the use of PDFs because they are quite difficult to update and correct, but more importantly they are incredibly easy to copy, and bypass the fundraising project. Sadly, our book was illegally copied and distributed on the scribd.com website – the book was uploaded there within 2 weeks of it being released, and had 5000+ views before issued a cease and desist…
The scan docs and screen grabs below tell the full story with two letters from UNICEF acknowledging the receipt of the donations, and some screengrabs and emails from the VMware Foundation acknowledging the donation.
Once again thank you to everyone…
