Customer Reviews

Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 Administrator's Companion (Pro-Administrator's Companion)

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

 

 

As an MCSE, I gave this book 4 stars for two reasons: the CD contains a 120 day trial version of Exchange 2003 Enterprise Edition, and the text provides a good overview of Exchange 2003 features suitable for MCSE test prep. I did not rate this book with 5 stars because it is presented as an "Administrator's Companion," which I felt was stretching it a bit. As a previous reviewer has stated, there are better alternatives for strictly "desk reference companions" to Exchange; however, I was pleasantly surprised by how readable the book was, given that it is a Microsoft Press publication.

For example, on page 9, the authors define policies thus: "Policies are collections of configuration settings that are applied to one or more Exchange configuration objects." The authors continue to define various policies in pretty basic terms. On page 268, the authors describe how to create a policy using step by step directions: "To create a server policy, right click the Systems Policy container, point to New, and then choose Server Policy." The instructions are also accompanied by extensive screen shots. While other reviewers found the screen shots redundant to the narrative, I feel comforted by the screen shots that match my screen when I am attempting to implement a procedure by following the text.

The book begins with an introductory chapter that provides a good review of the uses and concepts of Exchange, but is probably a waste of time for experienced users of Exchange. The following chapters include detailed instructions relevant to: planning, deployment, upgrading and migrating to 2003, functionality, security, maintenance (including disaster recovery and troubleshooting), and a fairly decent glossary. The authors also invite commentary and suggestions to their email sites: benglish@networknowledge.com and books@walterglenn.com. Both authors are MCSE and MCT certified.

I would recommend this book for those new to Exchange or preparing for the Exchange Server exam. Administrators looking for a thorough desk reference on the subject should try Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 24seven, ISBN: 0782142508.

This book helped me come up to speed in Exchange Server 2003 when I got sort of thrown into supporting it at work. It sounds like that last reviewr didn't get past the intro material. The first part of this book is all about architecture and planning. It was kind of dry and a bit more than I was ready for just learning about Exchange. But, starting with chapter 7, the book is all action. It takes you through installing, setting up recipients, storage groups, routing groups, administrative groups, and everything you need to know to get a server up and going. It has a great section on security. I get asked a lot of questions about that at work. It even talks about disaster recovery and performance tuning. The writings pretty easy to follow. They use lots of supporting pictures and step by step explanations. I just skipped the first 6 chapters and plan to come back to them after I've been using it a while.

The best thing about this book is the eval copy of Exchange 2003. The rest is architecture and concepts and not much on examples, real world senarios. Seems to me there's a lot of "Exchange can do this and can do that ..." but not much of ... "here's how u do this in Exchange". Not my cup of tea. Good reading for the geek that wants to understand how this all works ... and in time I will want to know that .. but not so good for those that want to get a good solution up and running. I'm bring it back and gonna buy MCSA/MCSE Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-284): Implementing and Managing Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 ...

This book is full-bodied and includes everything one would expect to run into when installing, managing, and maintaining Exchange Server 2003.

I've edited this review because I feel I may have been a bit too harsh. It is a good book, just not what I was looking for.

I need information on how to maintain an existing infrastructure and this was more in line with setting up the infrastructure. I need more of the "how to" stuff. There's not too much of that in here. If you want to know what makes Exchange run, without too much detail, then this book is for you. If you need to fix Exchange, then you need another book, and I'm still looking for that book. It just seems to hit lightly on a ton of stuff, but not deep enough on any one thing to give you a real understanding, or a way to glue it all together.

If you are an Exchange Administrator who wants to upgrade his support skills to Exchange 2003 this book is too basic. Case in point, Chapter 10 Monitoring Exchange Server 2003. "... Windows Server 2003 records many events in its own event logs."... "Windows maintains three distinct logs" (Application, Security, and System) "You will encounter five types of events in the three logs, and a unique icon identifies each event type so that you can easily disntiguish between the information entries and the error entries"

Aften times you find the author explaining the screen print of a properties page that is right below the text you are reading. News flash we see the picture, don't tell us what tabs there are and what buttons there are, tell us what they do, and when should we use them.

The font is nice and big, and the book makes a good book end for other more useful texts.

This is a good book for an intro to Exchange. No secrets in here - just the basics.

This is a great book for getting starting in Exchange. You are not going to get it all, but you will have enough to be quite competent in the software.

Hi, this book introduced me the Exchange Server 2003 and was very helpful in my understandable of the software itself.
I've read the comments people posted here about this title and found them misplaced.
The book is very good and covers an wide area of Exchange 2003 administration. It also explains how the software works and gives you a lot of hints about implementing security in your environment.
I didn't rate this 5 stars because it's not SO EASY to find information you that you need for now inside the package. Sometimes you endeavour ours searching chapter by chapter, until find what you want.
If people rated this so poorly and rated Exchange Server 2003 Resource Kit so richly, I believe the last one to be the best book about exchange ever.
I hope to help customers who are intended to buy these books, cause I appreciate these kind of constructive analyse.

I thought this book was pretty average. I know its not an exam prep book, and it certainly wasn't, but I didn't think it was much of an administrators guide either.

I found myself getting contually frustrated with the theory, and not enough practice. Buy Unleashed, or go to winstructor.com and get their videos, both are much, much better than this.