Learning Exchange Server 2003

Rating:
Summary: Your Exchange 2003 Start to Finish Guide
Review: Books teaching you a Server product always seem to fall into one of two categories; the Cram for the MCSE test (in which you get the information needed to pass the test and not really administer the product), or the Mastering style (in which you are stuck with an 800 page book that assumes you already have an environment and are only interested in over-covering the advanced or obscure features). I was pleasantly surprised to find that this title actually provides hand-held walk-thrus for the uninitiated, and continues the education process to cover basics, intermediate and advanced skills.

The author starts the title by ensuring that everyone has the same lab environment by way of an environmental setup walk-thru. This includes not only the Exchange portion itself, but hints and tips on how to minimize the hardware needed and build your environment with mostly trialware so as to keep the costs down for those who are reading the title outside of a corporate environment. From there, time is taken to introduce legacy and modern email protocols and formats in the context of the email client. Once covered you are taken deep inside the Exchange 2003 environment, starting with the service architecture and moving you thru server management, recipient / distribution list management and publishing, private mailbox and public folder health and control, message routing and finally Outlook Web Access. All of these topics are presented without undo references to how it was done in 5.5, which is a pleasant change from so many other titles that attempt the same level of Exchange education. Once you have become comfortable with the Exchange system itself, time is spent teaching you how Exchange is integrated with the parental network. This includes distributed architecture planning, Exchange 5.5 migration (which is separated out as a single chapter and easily skipped if you do not need it), and finally partner services, such as anti-virus and spam control mechanisms.

What really sets this title apart, is that time is taken to ensure that the Exchange specific terminology is defined clearly and that you understand what the components are before you find yourself 70 pages in and realizing that what you just read doesn't mean what you thought it did (or if you're like me, you've reached a point where you can no longer just skip over the word pretending that it isn't important). Although covering technical aspects, it is written neither so dryly nor so technical as to put the reader off; the author enjoys the topic and passes the enthusiasm along. If you are looking for a title to teach you to Exchange 2003 administration - pick this up.

Rating:
Summary: All about email
Review: Email is one of the core functionalities of a computer network. If those computers are running Microsoft operating systems, then Exchange Server 2003 often handles the mail. Due to the crucial nature of email, the book shows how Microsoft has built up a lot of capabilities into it. The book assumes that you are the sysadmin delegated to setting up and running it.

So there are lengthy but necessary explanations about the message formats. In the header and body. You can see the difference between bodies written in plain text, HTML or Rich Text Format. Though the latter is mostly supported only by Microsoft, and has gained relatively little traction elsewhere. Despite what the book says about RTF, you can often safely ignore it. Just concentrate on understanding the other two.

You will probably have to maintain distribution lists of your local users. The book gives elaborate GUIs built to simplify this work. Much fancier than editing files like /etc/aliases under unix.

The book also teaches a lot about how SMTP is handled by ES2003. Plus, it gives a good discussion about current antispam and antivirus filters. The level of detail about the antispam filters is concise and understandable, and is a fair summary of the main methods currently deployed.