>I waited out updating with the 2.7a stream until the new environments 
>stuff was shaken out a bit, so I just updated to 1716 this morning -- 
>and it went great!  I created some stuff, filed in old stuff, and 
>found no problems at all.  I was concerned from the previous email 
>that I was going to have to document new kinds of dialogs when doing 
>simple things like creating class categories, but I was very pleased 
>to see that the Environment mechanism seems invisible from a novice 
>perspective.  YAY!  Great job, guys -- it's nice that such a dramatic 
>change under the hood isn't impacting the Student Driver behind the 
>wheel!

You haven't missed out on all the fun, Mark.  A lot of the environment support is IN, but it isn't turned on yet.  Don't worry there will be new things to document, but perhaps we can maintain a release that starts out without partitioning for a little while.  Alternatively, as soon as we have real lift-off there (this week, I'm hoping), we can have some discussions about how to minimize the impact on student drivers (and your book).

I'm going to let someone else answer your questions about backward compatibility with stored books.

	- Dan