MCSE Training Kit (Exam 70-224): Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server Implementation and Administration [With CDROM]

If your goal is to obtain MCSE 2000 certification as soon as possible, then getting this book to tackle 70-219 should be an optimal choice. Or, if you have passed the 70-217 test and would like to find a concise yet comprehensive study guide to prepare/pass 70-219 in very short time (say 7 days), I suggest you check out this book. Because of higher price set by Microsoft Press, I had never read any of its publications for preparing my MCSE tests. But, I couldn't find appropriate book for 70-219 until I read one of the reviews about this book in this web page and decided to give it a try. I would say the result is beyond my expectation. The author does a good job by organizing what you need to pay attention in 5 short chapters. The subjects -- forest plan, domain plan, organization unit plan, site topology plan, migration plan -- and the styles presented by the author match nicely with what Microsoft tests about in 70-219. In fact, if you can jump over some of the irrelevant or less important pages, this can be a five star summary guide better than some of the Exam Cram series. Here are a couple of tips that may help you to further cut your study time: 1. Skip Chapter 1 and Chapter 2: it will save you nearly 90 pages reading time without negative impacts on the real test scores. 2. From Chapter 3 on, read each "Lesson" section thoroughly but skip "Activity" and "Lab" sections altogether. It would be quite efficient if you read every word in each "Lesson" and get solid understanding about the "reasons and advantages for choosing certain design strategy" and then supplemented with close-to-real test questions compiled by Tran___der.Overall, since the threshold for passing 70-219 is not high, you might easily overkill it by relying on this book alone.

In response to the other reviews, I do not believe that any one book is going to prepare you for the exam. And this book itself does not claim to. Throughout the text, there are ample references to Kalen Delany's "Inside SQL Server 2000" (A must have for any serious DB Designer/Admin) and to the BOL. If you use the book as it instructs, and you have the requisite experience (as outlined in the "About" section) then you will have learned a great deal and be prepared to pass the exam. If you are just looking for quick exam prep then buy the Troytech or Testkiller cheatsheets, but if you actually want to learn something then get this book and the aformentioned title by Ms. Delany. Also, the other reviews are correct regarding the "generic" nature of the examples. The idea being to provide the prospective examinee with the fountations of good design and implementation practices. If you've been designing MS SQL solutions than it is an excellent way to review these principles. And if you've never designed MS SQL solutions then it's not a bad place to start. Follow the instructions and you can't go wrong.

I did not take the exam for 70-220 due to a change in Microsoft policy that upgraded me to W2K MCSE status. However since I already had the book and find security very interesting and important I read it a couple of times. I found it extremely informative, well organized, and understandable. This book is much more than a step by step how to with screen shots manual that so many of the "core four" books seem to be - and you will need to look elsewhere if that is what you need, you will not learn how to install Certificate Services here. Each chapter starts with a network design scenario, presents you the theory/options and ends with the solution. Security relates to almost every action one takes on a W2K network. The first half of the book dealt with the more mundane security topics that most should already know by the time they are preparing for design exams - active directory design, group policies, dns, security groups, and file permissions. However the last half is where you learn the good stuff - ipsec, rras policies and authentication, public key infrastructure including certificate services, internet access, vpn, and securing an extranet with firewalls. I read three different books on 70-216, but this book still taught me a lot, especially about ssl and pki. The explanation of, and how to implement certificate services and smart cards was great. It also explained thoroughly about when to use a private versus public and standalone verus enterprise certificate server. I finally have a good understanding of when to use pptp versus l2tp for a vpn. Ipsec had a whole 50 page chapter devoted to it explaining in detail how to implement it. Page 413 has an excellent explanation on what goes on between a web client and a web server during ssl when logging into a secure website, and page 485 has a terrific and concise table showing all the remote access authentication protocols from Pap to Ms-ChapV2 to Eap-Tls and how to determine which to use for a particular condition and why. The chapter on securing an extranet was loaded with helpful diagrams and charts showing specific protocol/port/address/action settings for a particular firewall setup. Throughout the book there were LOTS of helpful charts and diagrams to accompany the text. I find the "making the decision" tables to be an extremely helpful learning tool - an exam cram type of summary of what was just covered. One side of the table lists what you want to accomplish while the other side lists your options. The end of chapter questions are all challenging "fill in the blank" type based on a mini case study. The answers with an explanation are at the end of the book. I was very impressed with the book. Since security is such an important core concept of networking I highly recommend this study guide to anyone wanting to learn more about Windows 2000 network security.

I recently worked on a Win2K/E2K project for a new n/w of approx 150 Users. My area of specialization is W2K and a work mate was dealing with E2K Side. We were scheduled to go live within 3 weeks when my colleague got faced with major family problems, hence wasn't going to be available for atleast 2 months. I've worked with Exch 5.5 in the past at a very high level, but hadn't dealt with E2K. Being the Head Engineer of the project i was in a fix, my first reaction was to obtain an external contractor, but obtaining an E2K expert was close to impossible. I decided to buy an E2K book, let me tell this book is God sent, I setup a lab as specified in the book and started reading aggressively mainly at night after work. Within 3-4 days i was ready to start the installation. I used the hardware requirement section to allocate the correct RAID drives for Exchange servers, installed Exchange, edited to default recipient policy to assign first.last e-mail addresses (%g.%[email protected]), created user mailboxes, OWA, Routing Group Connector (btn the 2 sites), public folder replication and even configured an instant Messaging server :-). The ebook installed on my laptop was great for quick references while onsite as i didn't want to carry a training kit to the clients site considering they were paying top dollar for the project. I wrote a detailed disaster recovery document using information in the disaster recovery section.My value has increased greatly since successfully completing this project, thanks to this book. Am not yet an E2K GURU but it won't be long before I become one. Guys if u plan to deploy E2K make sure this book is part of your collection.

I thought was a very good Training Kit for the 224 exam. One of the included CDs had .avi's showing all Practice Exercise's that were very usefully incase you dont have access to test equipment. The book was well written and I did not found any blatant errors. For my test prep, I used this and the Exchange 2000 Resource Kit. The training kit provided a great overall coverage and example exercises. The Resource Kit then was able to pound the deeper more technical aspects into my brain.Again I will go back to the exercises and .avi's. I personally dont have a cluster server to test on, but the training guide steps you through the install and configure process, while you watch it on video. The book also includes an eval copy of Exchange 2000 Enterprise and Outlook 2000