Rating: 
Summary: Excellent Book
Review: This book provides and excellent introduction to Exchange 2003. My favorite part by far was the windows and exchange migration. It also gives a lot of time to Outlook 2003 and OWA. Of course it is not possible to include particular things like clusting or having a conference room to automatically accept meetings. If you are new to exchange 2003, get this book. It is well worth the money. If you are looking to get to the next level, get the Exchange 24/7 like I did. But some people won't be satisfied because that book does not cover installations.
Rating:
Summary: Has it All !!!
Review: This book was recommended to me by our Microsoft TAM as the best Exchange 2003 book on the market. He was right, this book has real world information on how to successfully architect Exchange 2003 and migrate existing mail to the new environment. We used this book as our bible through most of last year. I just bought 5 more copies of book to hand out to my team as we need the same real world recommendations to administer and manage our Exchange 2003 enterprise, as well as tune and optimize our servers. This book makes designing, implementing, and supporting Exchange 2003 simple, and if you follow the procedures in the book, it actually does make what we thought might be complicated processes a whole lot easier. I describe this book as the guide for "real" Exchange architects, implementers, and administrators who want to know a lot of information quickly and succinctly.
Rating: 
Summary: Too general, not a hands on Server Book.
Review: This book, like all technical books, obviously took a number of people a large amount of time to complete. No disrespect to the authors but they missed a lot of basic things.The book does have some decent info. But, once again, it appears the publisher decided to put out a book to take advantage of demand for a new product. They should have focused more on beefing up their content and they might have had something. There is a lot of information that should be obvious to somebody with experience in the technology field. Do we really need migration planning meeting notes with generic categories like "Budgetary Issues, Planning Considerations, Technical Resources?" I don't think so. Worse still, some of the contents of the book were illegible. Figure 2.4 of the Sample Project Schedule was totally blotched. Is this a shameless attempt to further thicken a book that is 70% filler? Perhaps this was once again a failure in layout. They could have included all that migration stuff in a later chapter. Why did they include that before discussing more about the Exchange Server itself? In fairness, there was some useful info in the book. But do I have to see another screen shot of somebody right-clicking in the management console?!?! Argh!!! It's a shame that this book was such a missed opportunity. Publisher's like this need to pay for experience technical editors to correct these issues before publication. I don't blame them necessarily for trying to put out a book quickly and make a fast buck though. For somebody who is a TOTAL beginner in technology and wants to learn about Exchange, this book probably holds some value for you. If you've just been assigned to plan an Exchange Migration and you haven't a clue, there is plenty of filler here to prolong some useless meetings. For anybody with any experience or knowledge of Exchange, this book is repetitive, slow, and not an effective use of your time.
Rating:
Summary: Too general, not a hands on Server Book.
Review: This book, like all technical books, obviously took a number of people a large amount of time to complete. No disrespect to the authors but they missed a lot of basic things. The book does have some decent info. But, once again, it appears the publisher decided to put out a book to take advantage of demand for a new product. They should have focused more on beefing up their content and they might have had something. There is a lot of information that should be obvious to somebody with experience in the technology field. Do we really need migration planning meeting notes with generic categories like "Budgetary Issues, Planning Considerations, Technical Resources?" I don't think so. Worse still, some of the contents of the book were illegible. Figure 2.4 of the Sample Project Schedule was totally blotched. Is this a shameless attempt to further thicken a book that is 70% filler? Perhaps this was once again a failure in layout. They could have included all that migration stuff in a later chapter. Why did they include that before discussing more about the Exchange Server itself? In fairness, there was some useful info in the book. But do I have to see another screen shot of somebody right-clicking in the management console?!?! Argh!!! It's a shame that this book was such a missed opportunity. Publisher's like this need to pay for experience technical editors to correct these issues before publication. I don't blame them necessarily for trying to put out a book quickly and make a fast buck though. For somebody who is a TOTAL beginner in technology and wants to learn about Exchange, this book probably holds some value for you. If you've just been assigned to plan an Exchange Migration and you haven't a clue, there is plenty of filler here to prolong some useless meetings. For anybody with any experience or knowledge of Exchange, this book is repetitive, slow, and not an effective use of your time.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent for planning, not so good for daily administration
Review: This is an excellent book when it comes to planning an Exchange 2003 roll out, specially if you are new to exchange or coming from exchange 5.5. It has a chapter on virtually everything you need to know about how to get an exchange 2003 server up and running. In the day to day administration this book is not that good. It lacks detail when it comes to the under hood "stuff ", the how and why of the configuration examples in the book. It gives you enough to get the server up and running, but without knowing exactly how things work it is hard to troubleshoot. If you are looking for a book to study for certification this is not the book for you. On the other hand, if you are someone like me that is new to 2003 and AD then this an excellent book to begin with. It is easy to read and well organized.
I would give it 4 stars if it had more on troubleshooting and more real world examples.
Rating:
Summary: *** Excellent Information on Mobility ***
Review: This is the first book I've read that covers ALL of the mobile options that Microsoft touts as the biggest benefits for migrating to Exchange 2003. The coverage of RPC over HTTP (Ch.25) is the ONLY place I've seen step-by-step implementation procedures that work! (even the instructions on Microsoft's Website are not complete, so this book FINALLY helped me get it working!) The new Outlook Web Access (Ch.26) is covered in detail, so much so that I've actually earmarked the chapter and gave it to my boss on why our organization needs to migrate to Exchange 2003. And I'm just dabbling with the mobile phone and PocketPC devices, and the book (Ch.22, 23, 24) makes a great recommendation of downloading free emulators that I was able to test the functionality without having to buy mobile devices just yet. At a little over 1000-pages, this book has so far covered everything I've been looking for. I look forward to continuing my reading.
Rating: 
Summary: A thick Exchange 2003 Brochure
Review: Trust me. I went through many Exchange server books and I am an experienced system admin and Exchange admin. This book is the worst book for technical people. The concept in the book is for readers who are most likely a non-technical managers who want to have an overall knowledge about Exchange. If you touch Exchange server, do not read this book and waste your time. Go with Exchange 24/7 which is much better.
Rating:
Summary: Fabulous Resource!!!
Review: We just completed our migration to Exchange 2003, and this book helped us plan the process, gave us a solid outline on how to test the migration process, and walked us through our live production migration. The book also helped us better understand the administration tools in Exchange 2003 along with tips on ongoing maintenance and management practices that we have put in place. This was the best IT book I've ever owned, packed with great information!
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