Step 0, or Before All Else


Step 0, or Before All Else

Before we go any further, we'd like to introduce you to - or reacquaint you with - the single most important acronym you will ever encounter in the alphabet soup that IT professionals eat on a daily basis: RTFM, or Read The Fine Manual.

The improvements in Exchange 2007 don't just stop at the technical. Shortly after the Exchange 2003 release, the folks on the Exchange product team realized that a lot of their customers needed the kind of documentation that only the product team could deliver and have since done their best to step up to the plate to deliver thorough, usable content that actually answers the questions and solves the problems faced by people just like you. By now, they've gotten it down to a fine art; as a result, the Exchange 2007 documentation is more complete and realistic than the documentation for any previous version of Exchange.

Books such as this can help fill in the gaps and give you a good objective view of how to use Exchange 2007. Vendor documentation (whether from Microsoft or someone else) tends to make assumptions about your environment that may not be valid in order to push you toward the most recently adopted set of best practices that may not have had time to filter out into the real world but have proven their worth, and it may gloss over the pain points you're likely to hit even if you're following all of the official deployment advice. We, on the other hand, can tell you where those hidden assumptions are and how not meeting them will affect you, explain the operations of Exchange so that you can judge whether a new best practice actually makes sense in your environment, and highlight where you're going to hit trouble even when you're doing everything right.

That said, the product documentation is still an invaluable reference that should be a core part of your Exchange toolkit. Best of all, the documentation is freely downloadable from the Microsoft website, and the installer gives you links directly to the applicable downloads, which Microsoft updates on a regular basis.

We recommend that you download the Exchange documentation, browse through it, and see what kind of material it covers. Note any topics that seem especially pertinent to your organization or to issues you think are likely to be a problem for you. Read through the sections that cover those topics and see whether they make sense; if they don't, put them aside for later. There will come a day when you will read back through those sections and suddenly realize that you understand what they are saying.

Are you back with us now? Great! It's time to sit down at (or connect to) your server and get busy installing Exchange 2007.

Warning 

Even if you've decided you don't need to read the rest of the documentation, we urge you to at least read the single most critical piece of documentation: the release notes. You'll find them as a single HTML file in the installer directory, and if Microsoft follows the same practice they used during the Exchange 2007 beta period, it will give you the location from which you can download the most current version of the release notes. These are required reading, as they'll tell you about any last-minute issues, workarounds, and bugs that may impact your deployment.




Mastering Microsoft Exchange Server 2007
Mastering Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 SP1
ISBN: 0470417331
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 198
Authors: Jim McBee

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