Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)More than half finished with this book, I am writing a review from the perspective of an in-house person who manages IT as just one of my job duties in our small organization rather than from a consultant's point of view. The short of my opinion is this: 1) The value of this book will far exceed its costs if it saves you from making just one or two mistakes (and I think it will); 2) You will need more than this book to manage an SBS environment; 3) The target audience for this book remains ambiguous to me.
Depending on how extensively you use each component of SBS and what you already know, I recommend separate SharePoint, IIS, Exchange, and Active Directory books as well as one that covers Server 2008 in general in addition to this book. SBS Unleashed is far too short at 800 pages to cover these topics in enough detail for you to make full use of the product's capabilities.
Specifically, I would not feel comfortable managing an Exchange Server with only this book at hand. With three chapters (Management, Client Connectivity, Disaster Recovery), it is easily the most in-depth covered topic. That is appreciated; however, something as crucial and common as how to configure and manage email addresses that use both internal and external domains is only covered tangentially even though you will have both if you follow the instructions in the installation chapter. An Exchange Admin would likely find this trivial, but if this book was written for her, I am sure she would find an example of how to add an additional external email address (which IS included) even more trivial.
The SharePoint chapter also demonstrates additional books are in order. Seemingly randomly included is a step-by-step on how to setup a Wiki, but an explanation of exactly what can be done with SharePoint is missing. The take-away sounds like this: "SharePoint is a great document management and collaboration software package, here are the default settings, steps to merge existing data, how to back-up settings, and one page on troubleshooting." Disappointing. The same thing goes for Exchange Public Folders. You might learn how to back them up and a few (important) notes, but don't expect to be told how you can make use of them.
I would not have subtracted a star if it wasn't for two things: 1) Target audience, and 2) The chapter on IIS.
1) If this book is targeted at people who already understand the standalone products and are mainly interested in what is different in SBS, why would something such as a screen shot of where you enter your organization's address information be included? (I use that just as an example of the conflicting target audiences).
2) The chapter on IIS was extremely frustrating as it was not fully edited (wizard names confused, repetitive paragraphs, sentences that I don't think I should have had to read more than once or twice but did), it included a full page of a log file with no explanation, and it did a rough job of explaining certificates, which are better covered in a future chapter on Exchange Client Connectivity. It just seemed rushed and not thought out besides not doing you much good if you aren't already familiar managing IIS.
Despite my criticisms, this book is a must-buy if you are a consultant who has clients that might use SBS or if your organization is planning or considering implementing an SBS solution. The authors are really part of the SBS community and you can find some of them active on blogs and newsgroups (see the SBS newsgroups at Microsoft Connect). I do think they have taken a very complex product and presented a substantial amount of useful information in an engaging way that will help you manage SBS. I'm sure as more seasoned IT admins read the book, they will disagree with me.
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