Customer Reviews

Microsoft® Exchange 2000 Server Resource Kit (IT-Resource Kits)

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

 

 

If you plan to evaluate and/or deploy Exchange 2000, this book is a must have! It provides project planning, prototyping - to such an extent that it provides testing templates/criteria for Anti-Virus product evaluations; bare bones minimum deployment to advanced deployment topics such as Instant Messaging and Outlook Web Access. This book speaks to both the consultant AND the day-to-day administrator. For instance, they include hardware requirements for every scenerio you can think of, project templates, and especially nice for consultants, a functional spec template. That won me over completely. This was my best buy of the year!

I bought this as a reference companion to a recent Exchange 2K implementation. Unfortunately, I ended up using it very lightly.

The format of the chapters is mostly scenario concepts that dive into some details pertinent to each. The primary text being scenario based causes me to thumbs-down the general layout of the book.

I was unsatisfied when looking to the index for topics that would give me practical understanding, and therefore some guidance on best practice for certain Exchange 2K topics. The book kept on about the ideas of possible implementation and specific case studies it includes.

I may read through it again for some general less practical Exchange 2K knowledge, but I expected quality like that from the Windows 2000 Server Resource Kit, but not so.

I have been working with Exchange Servers for about 2 years, and now I in the process of going to Exchange 2000. I thought this would be a fairly transparent transition. After reading through this book I was amazed at how much work goes into the migration and upgrade.

From the planning of Exchange 2000 in an NT environment, to deploying and using Active directory services to over a 100 pages for upgrading and testing, which I found to most important reading.

Also there is discussion of the clients, working with applications that integrate with Outlook and exchange as well as Terminal Server and Outlook Web Access. I have already used or will be using several ideas that I learned from this book.

Finally there is a cd with tools and utilities included that help diagram the topology and another for modifying the Global Address list. Working with a couple of other people and using this book, the transition should be less complicated that I first thought

This is a great book, for consultants and how to plan, deploy and use in a test lab. The one thing that is missing is the Backup and Restore area, they give you a lot of mumbo jumbo on the requirements and RAID. What I want to know is if I have a server that drops dead, and I have a backup can I restore this to new server that I change the name. Now I am not talking about the Exchange Organization, because this is AD and must be the same. This was disapointing, not to have detailed information on something this important.

I own the Win2k resource kit which proved to be an excellent source of information, no matter what topic (well almost).

I didn't find the Exchange resource kit that useful for looking up information - the book seems like a collection of case studies rather than a list of facts. It always takes a long time to find information in the book.

Get this book if your task is to plan a complex Exchange 2000 scenario (which I wouldn't dare to do anyway - due to it's flakyness) which involves careful planning. Otherwise I would look for something else.

The only thing I liked was the included CD ...

The book seems good and goes into alot of detail in some sections. Haven't really read enough of the book at this stage to comment further. However...

The index looks like an after-thought in the copy I have. It has blank pages throughout which should have index entries on them and all lines are double spaced so the index uses many more pages than is necessary. This may be just a printing problem and I expect that this is fixed in later print runs. Still, not really good enough for a book that costs $130 (in Australia).