Welcome to my tenth book covering the technology in Microsoft Exchange Server and its surrounding ecosystem. I seem to have been constantly writing about Exchange since before its introduction as version 4.0 in March 1996 in books and many articles printed in the redoubtable Windows IT Pro magazine (http://www.windowsitpro.com). All my previous books were published under the Digital Press imprint, which has now disappeared as a result of corporate upheavals. This is my first book working with Microsoft Press and it’s been an interesting and productive experience for me to work with the publishing arm of the company that engineers Exchange. I look forward to future collaboration.

No book can cover every aspect of a huge product such as Exchange. To attempt to do so would require a multivolume set spanning many thousands of pages and create something that would probably be too expensive for most administrators to buy. This book covers the topics in Exchange that are most interesting to me and those that I think are most useful to the majority of administrators who need to understand how to manage an Exchange organization. There are some notable omissions, such as Unified Messaging and Exchange’s connection to other Microsoft products such as Office Communications Server, which you might find surprising. However, the truth is that there are other books available that do a good job of covering these topics, so I feel able to concentrate on the areas that I think deserve the most investigation (or are most interesting to me). There’s also an incredible amount of information posted in blogs and other commentaries available on the Web, so if your interest is piqued by a topic and you want to find more information, plug the topic into your search engine of choice and you’re likely to find additional insights and observations. Apart from anything else, you’ll discover information that is up to date and reflects advances due to software updates (I predict that Microsoft will continue to upgrade Exchange 2010 after Service Pack 1!) and the knowledge that accumulates over time about any product that’s used in production environments.

Exchange 2010 has been an interesting journey because it provoked more new thoughts and ideas for me than any other version released by Microsoft. Although Exchange 2007 laid down much of the architecture that Exchange 2010 exploits, there is a mass of detail in the changes between the two versions. Two of the three big changes effected in Exchange 2007—Windows PowerShell, the transition to a pure SMTP-based transport system, and the introduction of transaction log shipping as the basis for database replication—have been expanded and enhanced in a very effective manner. Remote Windows PowerShell and the Database Availability Group might be what people remember as the big new things that appeared in Exchange 2010, but their foundation was laid many years previously and what we see today is simply the result of a lot of development and hard work since Microsoft finished the development of Exchange 2003. Maybe that’s why there is so much to discuss and comment on.