| Microsoft Exchange Server is quickly becoming a popular product in Microsoft's BackOffice suite. As the weeks go by
since its April, 1996 introduction, the momentum behind Exchange Server continues to build. In its first version,
Exchange Server 4.0 is a powerful, feature-rich product that is finding its rightful place in the hands of the corporate
world both as a replacement for MS Mail 3.x and as a new messaging system.
Although there are several books available on Exchange, none of them really gets to the heart of the server side of the
product like this book does. There are plenty of folks out there who are trying to make things happen with Exchange
Server—it's precisely those folks who literally need a survival guide for Exchange Server. Therefore, this book is aimed
directly at them. Network administrators, technical decision makers, those who would deploy Exchange Server; this
book is targeted at them and more. And the book is useful for large and small installations alike.
The Microsoft Exchange Server Survival Guide emphasizes the essentials needed to get up and running, and stay up and
running. This approach is key to keeping the size of this book manageable. Otherwise, you'd be buying the book by the
pound. On the other hand, an exhaustive approach like Microsoft had to undertake with the product documentation is
overwhelming. Such an approach here would probably frighten away more readers than it would attract.
In order to keep the size manageable, the authors have made some assumptions about the target users and the typical
installation. Exchange scales from small, single-server sites of 50 or so users all the way up to enormous multiple-server,
multiple-site organizations of half a million users. Microsoft itself is one example of a rather large implementation, with
over 100,000 worldwide Exchange users at the time of this writing. Microsoft's documentation for Exchange covers this
full range of possibilities. As a result, a major part of the product documentation deals with issues concerning large-scale
systems. This stuff is naturally complex. |
