Free ebook is good primer on Exchange Server 2010.

Thinking of moving to Exchange 2010? You might want to take a look at a free electronic volume recently released by Red Gate Books.

The 188-page PDF book, Exchange 2010–A Practical Approach, is written by Jaap Wesselius, a senior Exchange consultant with DM Consultants, based in Amsterdam.

The most important change in the new version of Exchange Server, according to Wesselius, is the Database Availability Group.

“This will allow you to create multiple copies of an Exchange Server database within your organization, and you are no longer bound to a specific site (like in Exchange Server 2007), but can now stretch across multiple sites,” he writes.

Another change cited by the consultant is the creation of a new Continuous Availability technology to replace Cluster Continuous Replication and Stand-by Continuous Replication.

Some system administrators will welcome another difference highlighted by Wesselius. Windows Server fall-over clustering has been scrapped in the final release of Exchange 2010 and its components are now managed through the Exchange Management Console or Exchange Management Shell.

To keep the mailboxes of users on the system in check, a Personal Archive feature has been added to Exchange.

“With the new Personal Archive ability, a user can now have a secondary mailbox, acting as a personal archive– this really is a .PST killer!”, Wesselius writes.

“You now have the ability to import all the users’ .PST files and store them in the Personal Archive, and using retention policies you can move data from the primary mailbox to the archive automatically, to keep the primary mailbox at an acceptable size, without any hassle,” he adds.

Exchange 2010 is also designed to handle the growing storage problems confronting organizations, the consultant notes. Log and database files can be accommodated with a two terabyte SATA drive. In addition, size of databases that can be handled has been bumped up to 2TB, compared to 200 gigabytes in Exchange 2007.

“If you haven’t yet considered what your business case will look like when upgrading to Exchange Server 2010, bear in mind that this will truly save a tremendous amount of storage cost and that’s not marketing talk!” Wesselius writes.

How difficult is it to install Exchange 2010? Not difficult at all, asserts Wesselius. A Database Availability Group with multiple copies of the mailbox databases can be done with a single mouse click–although creating multi-site DAGs can be a little more complicated–and installing into a Exchange Server 2003 or 2007 environment isn’t taxing either. One thing to look for when installing into prior versions of Exchange, though, is the appearance of an additional namespace. In addition to webmail.contoso.com and Autodiscover.contoso.com, a third namespace is displayed–legacy.contoso.com.

While Wesselius was generally enthusiastic about the new Exchange Server software, he acknowledged that lovers of graphic user interfaces will find the offering deficient.

“Basic management can be done with the graphical Exchange Management Console, but you really do have to use the Shell for the nitty-gritty configuration” he writes.

“The Shell is remarkably powerful, and it takes quite some getting used to, but with it you can do fine-grained management, and even create reports using features like output-to-HTML or save-to-.CSV file. Very neat!” he adds.

The book is built around five chapters.

Chapter One gives the reader an overview of Exchange Server 2010, compares it to the 2007 version and discusses Active Directory.

Chapter Two discusses installing and configuring the program.

Chapter Three talks about 2010 coexisting with previous versions of Exchange Server.

Chapter Four is about managing the Exchange environment with tools like Exchange Management Console, Exchange Management Shell and Exchange Control Panel, as well as the remote options in PowerShell 2.0.

Chapter Five deals with continuous replication when using DAGs, which Wesselius calls “the best Exchange Server high availability solution ever made.”

“I realize I have not, and cannot, cover all aspects of Exchange Server 2010 in five chapters,” the author admits. “Just for a start, think about the Unified Messaging role for integration with your telephony system, or integration with Office Communication Server (OCS) R2 for presence information and Instant Messaging”

“There are a lot of areas I just can’t cover here (even though I want to), and a lot more depth I could go into but, because I wanted to make this a light, quick-start book and not an Exchange Server 2010 Bible,” I’ve had to be very focused,” he adds. “I hope you find that focus useful, and this guide practical.”