Acknowledgments

Rand H. Morimoto, MCSE We want to thank our acquisitions editor, Neil Rowe, who gave us the opportunity to write this book. To all those on the Sams Publishing team, including Mark Renfrow, Kate Givens, and George Nedeff, thank you for your edits and changes to put all the words in the right order and the management of this book to completion. Thank you to our technical editor, James Walker, for validating every page of content of the book for technical accuracy. We also want to thank all the consultants , consulting engineers, technical specialists, project managers, technical editors, and systems engineers at Convergent Computing who were valuable resources we called upon for the thoughts, suggestions, best practices, tips, and tricks that made up the content of this book.

And thank you to our dozens of early adopter clients who, in many cases, were our guinea pigs as we worked together years before the product release, helping us build case experience and knowledge of the technology.

Last but not least, to my wife Kim, thank you for taking care of the kids nonstop as I wrote evenings, nights, mornings, and on weekends for this book and the Exchange Server 2003 Unleashed book simultaneously . To Kelly and Andrew, thank you for being good while daddy wrote.

Andrew Abbate, MCSE This book wouldn't have been possible without the support and assistance of a lot of people. I'd like to thank Rand for the opportunity to write this book and for always being there to answer the many questions of a new author. Thank you to my co-workers for all the tricks I've learned from them over the years. A big thanks goes to all of my friends for not giving me too hard a time about over using the "sorry, I have to work on the book" excuse . I'd also like to thank them for occasionally forcing me to go play golf to keep myself sane during this project.

Eric Kovach, MCSE First and foremost I'd like to thank Rand Morimoto for giving me the opportunity to work on this project. I could not have done it without his continuous reassurance, generous advice, and invaluable mentoring. I'm also indebted to Jon Skoog and Amanda Acheson, the contributing writers who helped me. Their efforts and expertise truly make this book an in-depth and comprehensive work. Thank you to James Walker, not only for checking my facts, but also for making content recommendations that make this book more readable and technically valuable. I'd like to acknowledge all of my co-workers at Convergent Computing, a group of technical professionals who never hesitate to share their boundless knowledge or help me through a problem. Most notably, thanks go out to Andrew Abbate, who in addition to co-authoring this book has provided me with mentoring support and guidance over the past several months. Last, but not least, I'd like to thank my girlfriend Leanne Mackenzie for her patience, support, and encouragement throughout this process and especially during those many weekends and evenings that found me working on this book.