Customer Reviews

Microsoft® Systems Management Server 2003 Administrator's Companion (Pro-Administrator's Companion)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

There is no question that if you need to implement or administer SMS, this is a must own. The book covers everything needed to plan and configure your back-end environment, as well as to setup a good administrative model for IT support, application management and end-users control and deployment. This title will also serve as an excellent day to day resource long after you have implemented SMS.

Although I completely recommend this title, I found that this book isn't enough completely on it's own to truly cover all the ins and outs of SMS 2003. Microsoft provides two free downloads which I recommend you read and use in conjunction with this title; "Concepts, Planning, and Deployment Guide" and "Operations Guide" (The SMS 2003 Microsoft website also has many other resources for administration).

This book is easy to read. However, if you are wanting a book that has everything to get up and running on SMS 2003, this book is lacking. Make sure to read the product's release notes. If you have access to Microsoft TechNet and Microsoft's website, you will need it to do some homework. The Advanced Security model in SMS 2003 is definitely far different from previous versions of SMS. The book does not go into any of this in detail. I recommend this book, but make sure you collect up the other information I have mentioned.

The SMS 2003 Admin Companion is the best guide to SMS 2003 available. The author doesn't miss a thing and lays out the management applicaton in a logical manner. SMS 2003 is a huge application with a huge learning curve, and this book helps get you up-to-speed in as little time as possible.

This book goes into excellent detail about nearly every aspect of SMS 2003 and also tries to show the reader many of the pitfalls in deploying this huge program. The author is very thorough in explaining almost every aspect of deployment and management - there are lots of screen shots and excellent detail about the options.

This book fails in only two areas: 1). it is frequently aimed at deployment rather than administration (it is, after all, an ADMINISTRATOR'S Companion), and 2). it is too short. Regardless of those two factors, it is an excellent companion once your deployment is complete.

If you are just starting - or evaluating - SMS 2003 for your environment, read the whole book before you start. The author wrote with a well-organized structure, but (like many computer books) he focused on the "meat and potatoes" in chunks. This book is what I call 'thick reading' and can only be read in short and focused time chunks.

Regardless of that, no software program tome can be all-inclusive, but if you are looking for a fairly comprehensive SMS 2003 guide, money spent here is well worth it!

This book is wriiten with the expectation that you have working experience with SMS.

This is quite a voluminous book, with lots of screenshots and textual information. It defines clearly the purposes and goals of the Microsoft Systems Management Server 2003 software, explains fairly well why to use it and how to deploy it. If you didn't hear what SMS is and did never work with it before, this published work is of great value. However, when in comes to troubles with the use or the deployment of the software, this volume is of little worth. It does only explain the straight path when everything goes fine, but as soon as something went wrong, you are lost.

If you are new to SMS and you want to start working with this technology then this is not the right book. NOT because it is to complicated - more because it is way to detailed. But the book is great as a reference. I think it is even a must for a SMS admin. The topics are explained very clear and so far I found all the information I was looking for.

If you are new to SMS and you want to start working with it I recommend use the SMS 2003 CBT Nugget and work additional with this book to get deeper into specific topics.

But again - as a reference for you daily work this book is great.

As you probably realize there is not a large selection of books that cover SMS 2003. This book is probably an acceptable book for an SMS 2003 beginner or an admin who doesn't typically use all of SMS's functionality. The primary benefit this book provides is that it helps you to more clearly understand the poorly written documentation that Microsoft provides with SMS. It shows the reader in a logical well-ordered way how to setup SMS from the 1st SMS server through configuration of each of the major components of SMS as well as adding additional servers and sites into SMS. It also provides step by steps for each activity and simplified examples of how to use the major components and perform common SMS tasks. While step by steps are provided the authors could really haved used more and different types of examples in many cases.

The areas where this book could use significant improvement are in "real world" troubleshooting, design, and ongoing maintenance activities. It could also use more detailed information on configuring SQL for SMS usage as well important activities such as creating and setting container permissions in Adsiedit or ADUC. It also needs to be updated to include SP2 and the available feature packs that are out for SMS.

Over all this book is probably a tad overpriced for the information it provides since most, if not all, of the book information is in the SMS docs. I think this book should be no more than $40 but since there are so few other books I guess they can get away with the $60 price.

This book contains some good examples if you are upgrading from MS-SMS Version 2.0. Planning a new System Management Server within Active Directory can become quite complex, thus referring to the book made the task straight forward when creating a plan, implementation as well as upkeep. I would recommend this book if you need a guide through System Management Server.

This is a good reference for general SMS admin tasks but not a good source for troubleshooting in-depth issues or uncommon configurations. Comes with an eval version of SMS 2003 - I would rather see them include some web reporting templates or queries, admin scripts, etc..