The area where this book is strongest is in planning an Exchange deployment. In fact, more than half the book is concerned with planning issues, and rightly so given the complexity of Exchange 2000 and its dependence upon the equally complex Active Directory of Windows 2000. Some sections are really quite well done, such as the section on planning a migration from Lotus cc:Mail, Lotus Notes, and Novell GroupWise, which are covered in great detail. Other planning issues covered include planning your site topology, planning for corporate and users' needs, planning for disaster recovery, developing a routing strategy, and so on.

The rest of the book covers Exchange administration, and here I feel the book falls a bit short. The chapters here cover installing Exchange, installing and configuring core components, installing and configuring clients, administration, and preventative/curative maintenance. The chapter entitled Administering Microsoft Exchange 2000 should have been much more detailed on topics like permissions, policies, and recipients, which are covered only briefly and with none of the step-by-step procedures evident throughout the rest of the book. 

So while this book is useful as far as planning an Exchange deployment is concerned, it's not at all useful for day-to-day administration of Exchagne once you have your deployment completed. I suppose that's an inevitable consequence basing a book on beta and early release candidates of a product and not on the final gold/RTM version. I can appreciate a publisher's strategy in wanting to be first to market with a book on a new product, but another result of this is that errors and inconsistencies creep in. For example, on p.161 while discussing planning a site topology, it states concerning Exchange 2000 that "The best and fastest way to connect two sites on the same logical local area network is though the site connector, which uses remote Procedure Call for communication." That is obviously wrong and refers to Exchange 5.5 instead, since the Exchange 2000 version of the Site Connector is the Routing Group Connector and it uses SMTP not RCP. Similarly on p.203 it says concerning linking Exchange 2000 server sites that "You can connect site in a few ways, including using a Site Connector, X.400 Connector, RAS Connector." Again this is how Exchange 5.5 worked, not Exchange 2000. But later on at p.474 the author corrects himself and says "The three types of connectors you can use to connect routing groups within an organization are Routing Group, SMTP, X.400" which is correct. Probably what happened is that the author based the earlier part of the book on Exchange 2000 Beta 3 and the later sections on RC1 where things changed considerably. But this kind of thing is rare and the book is reasonably accurate on most issues relating to Exchange design and deployment. 

I give this book stars out of five. I'd like to see it revised once RTM happens, and I hope Coriolis will do this. 

You can find this book on Amazon here.