The book is not intended to have a long shelf life since it describes the product while it was still in its pre-beta and beta development period. It also covers many topics in a general fashion since step-by-step procedures for many administrative tasks had not been ironed out during the beta process (even with RC2 some tasks are obscure to perform).

But if you are considering upgrading your mail systems to Exchange 2000 once the product is RTM, then you might want to give this book a quick read. 

Chapter 1 provides a general overview of how the Exchange platform has evolved from version 4.0 to 2000. You can bleep over this as it's just marketing stuff, and while it may be useful for IT decision-makers it's of little interest to the technically minded.

Chapter 2 provides an overview of Active Directory, again at a very general level. The discussion of how Exchange 2000 integrates with AD is confined to the last couple of pages. 

Chapter 3 covers customizing MMC consoles, commonly-used snap-ins for administering Windows 2000-based networks, Exchange System Manager, creating administrative and routing groups, connectors (including AD connector), and the Migration Wizard. Most of this is covered at a general level but there are a few descriptions of tasks you can perform.

Chapter 4 deals with installing Exchange 2000 and focuses on planning issues like planning your domains, OUs, sites, routing groups, and administrative groups. It then goes on to consider new installations, installing Exchange 2000 for coexistence with existing mail systems, and upgrades and migrations. Again, only general steps are considered. In fact, I wouldn't want to begin upgrading my Exchange 5.5-based messaging system to Exchange 2000 using only this chapter. See the document Exchange 2000 in Six Steps on Microsoft's Exchange web site for a walkthrough of the process, which is frighteningly complex. 

Starting with Chapter 5 the "Overview" part of the book ends and the second part "Under The Hood" begins. There is more detail on AD and how Exchange 2000 integrates with it (chapter 5), a discussion of the Web Store and storage groups (chapter 6), multiple databases, clustering, load-balancing, and distributed configuration using front-end and back-end Exchange servers (chapter 7), configuring SMTP and understanding message routing (chapter 8), NNTP and OWA (chapter 9), and real-time conferencing (chapter 10). The book finishes with a glossary.

It's easy to try to criticize this book as being too weak on technical details. But the fact is this book is not intended as a daily administration guide but as an overview of a product that has not yet been RTMed. So I'll be fair and give it stars out of five.

Here is where you can find this book on Amazon.