Paul Robichaux - Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 Inside Out: Connectivity, Clients, and UM

This book is for experienced Exchange administrators who want to gain a thorough understanding of how client access, transport, unified messaging, and Office 365 integration work in Exchange Server 2013, the latest version of the Microsoft enterprise messaging server first released in October 2012 and updated on a frequent basis since. It isnt intended to be a reference, and it isnt suitable for novices.

In 2011, when Tony Redmond and I were working together to present the Exchange 2010 Maestro workshops in cities throughout the United States, we spent a lot of time talking about the nature of an ideal Exchange book. It should be comprehensive enough to cover all the important parts of Exchange, with enough detail to be valuable to even very experienced administrators but without just parroting Microsoft documentation and guidance. As far as possible, it should draw on real-world experience with the product, which of course takes time to produce. Out of those talks came Tonys idea to write not one but two books on Exchange 2013. A single book would either be unmanageably large, both for author and reader, or would omit too much important material to be useful.

Although Tonys Exchange 2013 Inside Out: Mailbox and High Availability (Microsoft Press, 2013) draws on his long and broad experience with the nuances of the Exchange mailbox role and how to put it to work, this book covers all the other things Exchange does, including client access, transport, unified messaging, and the increasingly important topic of Office 365 integration. Because Exchange 2013 is an evolution of Exchange 2010, we decided to use Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Inside Out (Microsoft Press, 2010) as the base for the new book. For the topics in this book, so much has changed since Exchange 2010 that only a small amount of the original material remains. The rest is new and was written to take into account the many changes and updates that Exchange 2013 has undergone since its original release.

I have had the good fortune to work with and around Exchange for nearly 20 years. During this time, Ive seen the Exchange community, product team, and product evolve and grow in ways that might not have been predictable back in 1996. If you went back to, say, 2000 and told the Exchange product group, Hey, in 2013, your product will be deployed to hundreds of millions of users worldwide, many with tiny handheld computers that are more powerful than your desktop, and a whole bunch of them running as a Microsoft-hosted service, youd be bound to get some skeptical looks, and yet here we are.

I hope that you enjoy this book and that youll read it alongside Tonys Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 Inside Out: Mailbox and High Availability . The two books really do go together. Tony and I exchanged technical editing duties for our respective books, so we share responsibility for any errors you might find.