Who Should Read This Book?

If you are an Exchange 2000/2003 administrator, this book should have something useful for you. In addition to providing a handy reference for the various tasks involved in installing, configuring, and maintaining an Exchange deployment, it also provides details on some of the most useful of the many tools and utilities for Exchange. We have attempted to provide pointers to additional beneficial information for every topic and recipe.

This book is also helpful for programmers and script writers who need to automate Exchange management and deployment tasks. While not every Exchange job can be easily scripted, many tasks can. The Microsoft documentation is not always clear or complete; wherever possible, we have tried to give you working VBScript examples of how to accomplish a particular goal instead of a script that meekly enumerates the various properties and tells you their current values. We try to explain how the scripts work so you know how to adapt them to your own situation.

This book does not cover any Exchange 5.5 issues. While we occasionally compare a given feature of Exchange 5.5 with the modern versions of Exchange, we had to draw the line somewhere. Exchange 5.5 is nearing the end of its support and the release of Windows Server 2003 addresses the majority of the underlying issues with Active Directory that kept many companies from upgrading sooner. Likewise, we do not provide any in-depth coverage of upgrading from Exchange 5.5; that is a topic that is worthy of its own book. Microsoft has created a lot of excellent guidance on upgrading and if you need specific guidance on that topic, the authors of this book participated extensively in writing the Solution Accelerator for Exchange Consolidation and Migration, which includes three sample Exchange deployments and step-by-step examples of the upgrade process. You can browse or download the Solution Accelerator from the Microsoft web site at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/itsolutions/ucs/ecm/saecm/default.mspx.