A Surface View of Exchange 2000 Server
Don't expect to learn more about Exchange 2000 Server than the name
of this book implies.
Pay close attention to the title of this book -- Introducing Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server --and do not take the word
"Introducing" lightly. It truly is an introduction and therefore, do not
expect this book to answer the deployment questions that have kept you
up for several nights, or help you with your migration strategy.
If all you
need is the "in a nut shell" look at Exchange 2000 without getting bogged
down with deep technical explanations, this is the book for you.
It starts
out with a historical view of Exchange since its birth, which people with
any sort of interest in the evolution of things in general, such as myself,
will appreciate.
Next, there
is a section that means to give some background on Windows 2000, and I
must say that despite the good intentions of the author, this section
can be skipped all together. If you have no experience whatsoever with
Win2K you will find it too vague and confusing to be of any real value;
if you do have a fair amount of experience with Win2K, you will find yourself
frowning at the diagrams that do not use the standard graphic representations
such as circles, instead of triangles, for domains, not a big deal per
say, since the book doesn't claim to be an introduction to Win2K. But
a little bigger deal would be the few statements about the technology
that could be easily misinterpreted as inaccurate (unless heavily wrapped
in assumptions and some twisted creativity) such as "What used to be a
mailbox is now a Win2K user" or "the MMC is one of the most significant
features of Exchange 2000."
From that
point, the author dives into a section that mixes some administrative
concepts from both Exchange 2000 and Win2K, along with screen shots of
how this brave new world will present itself to future Exchange administrators;
followed by a section on installation, where the author spends some time
going over relevant installation considerations. There is a brief, and
very brief indeed, mention of how one would actually get an Exchange 5.5
environment to Exchange 2000, consisting of a few pros and cons on different
upgrades, no groundbreaking information per se.
About one
hundred pages or so into it (133 to be exact), we finally get to discuss
Exchange 2000 in some sort of depth. The author starts with an overview
of the Web store and all the wonderful things it will do for Exchange
and for our ever bubbling and hype collaborative world. Then we get to
other database technology enhancements, such as the multiple databases,
Installable File System, front end/back end infrastructure and so on.
An overview of Conferencing services, Instant Messaging and Chat wraps
up the book, which will leave you wondering why is it that you can't get
rid of that feature guide after-taste?
In summary,
the book does a good job giving a general overview of the Exchange 2000
features. However, anyone looking for solid information needed to design,
deploy or migrate to an Exchange 2000 environment will find this book
too basic. Mind you, the author does point out that this was all based
on a beta release of the product, so the lack of depth overall should
not come as a surprise.
About the Author
Valéria Struk Ganamet, MCSE, has worked closely with Exchange since its first release, and also Windows NT 3.51, 4.0 and Windows 2000. She is the project lead for the Exchange 2000 and Conferencing server deployment, and also lead on the Microsoft based collaborative strategy development for EDS globally.