Book Review: Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 Inside Out: Mailbox and High Availability
With a great focus on Exchange 2013, Tony Redmond demonstrates in depth the essentials to achieve not just High Availability but also a superior performance experience. It highlights and presents in great detail about features that give insights in planning and designing Exchange 2013. A quick snapshot about the changes introduced in Exchange 2013 provide a good platform for a reader’s refresh and will benefit the reader in building the foundation. The book then quickly progresses to the ideology behind the upgrade to Exchange 2013 and explains well about “behind the scenes” discussions. It also presents a good dimension about how Microsoft is taking a strategic direction towards cloud and how Exchange is shaping in that realm.
Links to purchase on Amazon:
Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 Inside Out: Mailbox and High Availability
With enterprises and SMBs contemplating about emails being “on and off premise”, the fact that stands out is that all of them want High Availability and downtime is a completely undesired option. The author has started the conversation from not just planning, but also focused well on the factors that one should ponder upon before planning. He has dedicated two chapters to clearly illustrate how significant it is to correctly plan, design and deploy Exchange 2013, which paves a big role to achieve High Availability.
Mailbox management is a strong reflection of how well the user experience is and factors that can contribute for performance issues. The books covers in great detail about scenarios in which mailbox management can be crucial for performance along with quick solutions and tips for problematic scenarios. There is a good emphasis on mailbox health check, corrupt item detection & isolation and maintenance check. A particular highlight that will be certainly useful for readers is the section titled “Debugging swelling databases” which is often encountered and felt as a challenging issue for admins to resolve quickly.
Many tasks of maintaining an Exchange environment ranging from creating a DAG, moving, managing and replicating mailboxes are also discussed well. The author has also covered the “governance and compliance” dimension in a very interesting manner explaining well about the need and benefits, audit requirements, how to effectively utilize the “recoverable item structure” and administering user mailboxes.
My overall take is the book is a great eye opener to many of the minute interesting details that will help you relate all the background action, helping you design, build and manage your email environment perfect.
If you are serious about learning Exchange 2013 – this is what I would add to my cart!!!
Links to purchase on Amazon:
Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 Inside Out: Mailbox and High Availability
Ratish Nair
Microsoft MVP | Exchange Server
Team @MSExchangeGuru
October 30th, 2013 at 10:20 pm
Anyone wants to implement Exchange 2013 On-Premises, this is the book.
Tony (The King of Exchange On-Premises) did a great job with this book.