Customer Reviews

How to Cheat at Managing Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2003

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Susan Snedaker's superbly organized and presented instructional guide, How To Cheat At Managing Windows Small Business Server 2003, is a recommended pick for any Microsoft system engineer managing a Windows Server 2003 environment: it tells how to overcome common problems and time drains that Exchange Server creates, such as handling user permissions and security settings, and it also covers group policy, installing printers, managing client computers, and more. The disaster planning portion is particularly well detailed.

Snedaker takes a pragmatic approach to the sysadmin tasks described in her book. She does not attempt to give a comprehensive discussion of all that is in Small Business Server 2003. For that, you can turn to Microsoft's official documentation. But a problem with the latter is that it is voluminous. Snedaker aims this book at someone who may not have the time or inclination to go through the latter.

So she describes what to her are the key issues you are likely to face. For these, she speaks as plainly as possible about how to solve them. You get enough information to (hopefully) perform your tasks. There is no elegant description of the structure of SBS. But do you really care?

The book can function as a good front end to the Microsoft documentation. You can try using it first. Then, for more detail, refer to those.

Excellent book, good examples, good step-by-step instructions. Covers remote access, adding users, computers, etc.m messaging, outlook web access. I can;t tell you how many times I've leafed through it in the last few days to find a piece of info. Good info on troubleshooting, errors, all the stupid stuff I do when I'm rushing.

This book is great for those that only work on small business server on occasion. I refer to it every few weeks. a great reference.

I recently installed Windows Small Business Server 2003 and used this book as my guide. The book's clear, direct approach to each of the planning and installation tasks helped me get through the installation without a hitch. Although I'm familiar with many aspects of the Windows Server environment (I had been running Windows 2000 Server before), the SBS software contains features new to me. Snedaker's concise treatment of the new features and how to best work with them saved me time and effort. Although the book doesn't contain every single detail related to SBS 2003, it contains enough of what you really need to know and helps point you in the right direction if you run into problems. The straightforward language of the book is definitely refreshing, and the approach is excellent. I'd highly recommend this book to anyone installing or maintaining a Windows Small Business Server 2003 system. Excellent from cover to cover.

This is a great resource for anyone who is installing or maintaining Windows SBS. There are a lot of screen shots so you know where you're headed and the information is clear and concise. I didn't want a lot of technical jargon, just a book that could help step me through the setup and installation and help me avoid common mistakes. This job filled the bill and I'd recommend it to anyone who's working with SBS.

I ordered this book thinking that it will give FAQ style problem scenarios and solutions, but so far I've read 180 pages and it is just an excellently written manual. So I am disappointed, however I have to say that as a manual it is first class. Clear to understand.

My general problem is that with stuff like domain management, I can understand all the concepts (well, most anyway), but when something invariably goes wrong, I get stuck. e.g. I can't open another user's Exchange file, even though I had given myself read access. I was hoping that this book will be more helpful in cases like that. Perhaps the final chapters? I hadn't looked there yet.

Significantly helped me deploy windows 2003 server small business edition. easy to read and with lots of practical advice, without adding lots of unnecessary information. If you are installing this o/s, I would advise this as your first purchase.

With few exceptions, this book simply instructs the reader to accept default prompts and reiterates the choices offered by dialog boxes. I suspect the book has two target audiences: 1) small business owners who don't want to know much about SBS and just get it running, and 2) those who need to get it running but also want to learn about the program. For the first group, I suggest you save the time you would spend reading the book and do whatever it is you do to make money and use it to pay an IT professional to install and configure SBS. For the second group, I suggest you buy another book that explains SBS in greater detail.

Since the wizard is pretty straight forward the book wasn't much use. I would have liked more discussion of when to use the default and when to customize.

The book advises a minimum 8 gb system drive. Even with Exchange et al on another partition the updates eat up most of the 8 gb quickly causing performance problems. I suggest 14-16 gb wth hard drives so cheap and the time wasted if you have to repartition.

Another place the book recommends the hard drive be at least 2 gb. That may be the minimum per MS but the author should provide realistic minimums.