Excellent overview. This type of book would be a must read on any Exchange Admin's desk!
-----Original Message----- From: Jason Gurtz [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, January 14, 2008 4:17 PM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: RE: What would YOU want to know? > First off, I am not a big fan of 'combined' style books unless the > products are obviously intertwined (something which SCCOM and EXCH are > not in my opinion) I wholeheartedly agree. It would be much better to see a title like "Exchange: Best Practices for Operations and Monitoring." Operations = Common and esoteric business needs. Monitoring = finding and solving problems, and increasing performance and availability. Possibly (due to size) this would be two volumes, one for operations, one for monitoring. If it's easily found in the documentation it probably doesn't belong. This should focus on clarifying best practice and solving business need. This book would cover Exchange in the current 2007 SP1 version and also outline and note differences back to possibly 5.5 (still widely in use thankfully not here :). The best practices part would pertain to real world operations in small, medium, and large (and possibly ISP if anyone's that crazy) size organizations. These best practices would include programs like SCCOM and other competing products of that nature, homegrown programs in C#/VB.Net that utilize various related messaging APIs, and scripts (in cmd, power shell, vbs, Perl, iron Python, SysInternals tools, etc...) that utilize APIs or interact with the filesystem. I would fully expect that Spam/Malware fighting methods and proper architecture represent a third of the content. This would include extensive discussion on DNS related items, not only in relation to blocking the bad stuff, but also with a strong focus on site reputation and deliverability. Obviously, there would be talk of the edge transport role in EX2k7, but a serious book would also talk extensively about third party solutions (both commercial and open source). Fully vetting in black and white the SMTP bugs in the various versions of the Exchange SMTP engine (incoming and outgoing) should be done including discussion of the many hotfixes that deal with them! Off the top of my head other topics should be (in no particular order): -Relevant RFCs mentioned -Mailbox management/provisioning -MUA issues (cover not only lookout but also 3rd party clients that use POP/IMAP) -Remote traveling users and relaying. -Effectively dealing with large attachments -Aliases (distribution groups) -General messaging security -Archiving and compliance (HIPPA, etc...) -performance on foo hardware (fully vet how much Ex loads disk writes vs. reads, memory footprint, CPU loading etc... all per mailbox). -reporting (in all its various guises) Use one of the many O'Reilly animal series books (for example Sendmail/Sendmail cookbook) as a guide. I realize this future tome is probably as much an MS marketing effort to sell SCCOM as much as it is help for admins but hopefully that waste of paper won't happen. Good luck, ~JasonG -- ~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~ ~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja ~ ~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~ ~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja ~
