Author: J. Peter Bruzzese
Publisher: SAMS Publishing (www.informit.com/sams)
Published: December 2008
ISBN-10: 0-672-33048-2
ISBN-13: 978-0-672-33048-3
Format: Soft cover, 336 pages.
Price: $29.99 (plus free access to an online edition of the book after purchasing the hard copy version)
Ready to Implement Solutions for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007
The book, “Exchange Server 2007 How-To”, definitely lives up to its subtitle of “Real Solutions for Exchange Server 2007 SP1 Administrators.” It has been written by J. Peter Bruzzese, an independent consultant and trainer with extensive practical experience with Exchange Server, and whose focus and specializations are Active Directory, Exchange support, education, and certification training. He is the co-founder of the ClipTraining company (www.cliptraining.com), and on Bruzzese’s own site (www.exclusivelyexchange.com), you can tap into a comprehensive number of resources applicable to Exchange, including 150 free training clips for Exchange 2007.
If you are new to Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, then the best place to start reading this particular book is at the very first chapter. It is here that the book’s author, J. Peter Bruzzese, provides both an overview of Exchange Server 2007 SP1 and the steps to plan for its deployment within your company or organization. Topics discussed in this initial chapter are titled as follows:
• An Overview of Exchange 2007 SP1
• Choose Your Exchange Server Roles
• Determine Your Server Type: Server 2003 or 2008
• Choose Your Exchange 2007 Version
• Choose the Right Hardware for the Role
• Ensure the Needed Software Is Installed First
• Ensure Components Are Installed Per Server Role
• Plan Your Exchange Storage Architecture
This opening chapter of the book is available online for reading for free from the site of the book’s publisher, SAMS Publishing (www.informit.com/sams).
The remainder of the content of “Exchange Server 2007 How-To” has been organized into eleven chapters. A brief rundown of each of those chapters is now presented (you can view the full Table of Contents for yourself on the site of the book’s publisher, SAMS Publishing, at www.informit.com/sams):
• Chapter 2: A discussion of various deployment scenarios, for example, upgrading from Exchange 2007 RTM to SP1; making the transition from Exchange 2000/2003 to Exchange 2007; migrating from Lotus Domino; or migrating from Novell GroupWise. When considering deployment, Bruzzese stresses that one of the keys to success is to “investigate your options and evaluate your needs before you stray from the native tools Microsoft provides.”
• Chapter 3: A run down of installing Exchange Server 2007. But before proceeding too far down the installation track, Bruzzese warns that “to truly be sure that your system is ready, you need to use a tool called the Exchange Best Practices Analyzer, which includes a Readiness Check.”
• Chapter 4: Managing storage and databases. A vital component of this aspect of management is ensuring that both the performance and fault tolerance of storage groups, databases, and transaction logs are maximized. To accomplish that maximization, Bruzzese has included advice about how to configure a best practice disk strategy in this part of his book.
• Chapter 5: Managing recipients through the creation of user mailboxes, resource mailboxes, distribution groups, and dynamic distribution groups, and so on.
• Chapter 6: Managing organization permissions and mailbox settings. After explaining how to create Exchange Administrative roles, Bruzzese then turns his attention to working with address lists; working with offline address books; the meaning and use of Managed Content settings; and configuring mailbox properties and settings.
• Chapter 7: Configuring the Client Access Server (CAS). In this part of the book Bruzzese investigates the role of the CAS and what is involved in the administration of its many different features.
• Chapter 8: Administrate transport settings. Examples of just four of the topics talked about in this part of the book are working with accepted domains; implementing email address policies; working with remote domains; and setting transport rules (what kind of rules can be applied and how are those transport rules used).
• Chapter 9: Designing and deploying disaster recovery settings. No discussion of Exchange Server would be complete without a frank discussion about designing for disaster, with both disaster recovery solutions and disaster readiness put under the spotlight.
• Chapter 10: Designing and deploying high availability for Exchange Server 2007. Possibilities for ensuring availability include Local Continuous Replication (LCR), Cluster Continuous Replication (CCR), Standby Continuous Replication (SCR), and Single Copy Clusters (SCC). Bruzzese correctly reports that the choice of a high availability option largely depends on two simple factors: first, the size of your organization, and second, how much has been budgeted. For instance, he maintains that “if you have a small environment with a single Exchange server, it would hardly seem necessary for you to purchase a secondary server, upgrade everything to Enterprise Edition Windows Server software, cluster the two systems, and work out a CCR implementation."
• Chapter 11: Configuring a Unified Messaging Server. Bruzzese believes that “Unified Messaging (UM) brings with it new terms and concepts that most Exchange administrators have never heard of before.” So this chapter has been written to explain what UM offers in Exchange 2007 and its different features, as well as the complexities that are involved from an implementation perspective.
• Chapter 12: Monitoring and troubleshooting your Exchange environment. The last chapter of the book is devoted to strategies to follow when things go wrong. The discussion includes both the use of the Exchange 2007 Toolbox and the EMS (Exchange Management Shell) Test cmdlets for troubleshooting.
In order to gain a full understanding of Exchange Server, I recommend that you read this book in its entirety from cover to cover. I agree wholeheartedly too with Bruzzese when he states, in the introduction to his book, that “the most important aspect of the how-to premise is the provision of step-by-step instruction that walks you through each and every step of the wizards and dialog boxes that Exchange provides in the GUI console. Along with clear instructions on managing and configuring your Exchange organization, we provide clear figures and screenshots of only the most important elements you face visually while working with your Exchange servers.”
Contained within all the chapters of the book are small sections that Bruzzese has given the title of “Scenario/Problem.” Bruzzese has included these sections in his book to “serve as starting points for the administrator to consider. At times, the information provided helps you deal with a specific problem that you might face. Typically, a scenario is described that enables the administrator to determine whether this direction is needed for his particular organization.” Bruzzese points out that “the solution that follows each scenario-problem includes additional information about a particular technology or design element to consider before providing step-by-step instructions. This additional information is provided so that you have more than just commands, but also the underlying reasons for the instructions.”
Also widely used throughout the book are “Note” breakout boxes that contain handy pieces of information. The sort of information contained in these boxes falls into two different categories, with the first type being information that you need to know about but which does not fit neatly into the particular topic that’s being discussed in that part of the book. An example is a “Note”, in the chapter about deployment scenarios, that informs you that the topic of ‘Public Folders” will be discussed in depth in a later chapter of the book. The second use of the “Notes” boxes is probably the more important of the two, and this is where they are used to quickly draw your attention to more technical or procedural information that is essential to know about. For instance, a short “Note” that describes how to add or remove members of a Distribution Group.
A physical aspect of the “Exchange Server 2007 How-To” book that is noticeable as soon as you pick it up is its size. At just over 300 pages in length, it is considerably smaller than the majority of books that have been written about Exchange Server 2007. Bruzzese is quick to acknowledge that, in fact, “most Exchange books are 800, 900, or even 1,500 pages in length! And for some, that is just the kind of book they need to accomplish their messaging goals. However, this book is a “how-to” book. It’s designed to give an administrator what she needs to understand the concepts involved in managing an Exchange 2007 SP1 environment and to perform the necessary tasks.”
A bonus with “Exchange Server 2007 How-To” is that it also contains advice about how to continue to expand your knowledge of Exchange Server even after you have finished reading the book. That advice comes in the form of addresses of websites and weblogs that Bruzzese recommends that you add to your list of Favorites at work because, as he says, “Exchange Server 2007 will continue to evolve and change as Microsoft adds more features, fixes, and enhancements.”
One final point. At the time of writing this review, “Exchange Server 2007 How-To: Real Solutions for Exchange Server 2007 SP1 Administrators” was one of three books in the “How-To” series from SAMS Publishing (www.informit.com/sams). The titles of the two other books are “SharePoint 2007 How-To” and “Active Directory Domain Services 2008 How-To.” If those two books contain as many insights and practical knowledge about their respective subject areas as does the “Exchange Server 2007 How-To” book, then they are worth investigating too.