If you’re an Exchange administrator who has to cope with the slings and arrows of outrageous Apple technology, aka the iPhones and iPads that have become essential business equipment over the last few years, you could do worse by placing an early order for iPhone with Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 - Business Integration and Deployment
I don’t typically recommend books that have not yet been published because I know that many a twist lies between an author typing the last word and the final printed copy appearing. However, this book is written by Steve Goodman, a gentle soul who has made many previous contributions to the Exchange community, including his organization report written in PowerShell, a wonderful piece of work that creates a nice snapshot of an Exchange organization from the data held in Active Directory and other sources. The report works inside organizations that have Exchange 2003, Exchange 2007, and Exchange 2010 servers and includes details of such essential elements as Database Availability Groups.
Steve has been grappling with iPhones and iPads in his daily work as an Exchange administrator for a large company. As such, you can take it that the advice given in the book is practical and down-to-earth. In fact, it’s the kind of stuff that an elder sibling might tell you as you head out into the world to deal with the various challenges that an email administrator faces. Based on the draft copy that I reviewed, the chapters are as follows:
1. Introduction to Exchange 2010 and iOS devices.
2. Implementation and Architecture Planning (for the deployment of Exchange 2010 and iOS)
3. Connecting iOS devices to Exchange 2010 (includes the basic networking configuration that's required)
4. Connecting iOS devices to Exchange Online/Office 365 (includes setting up an Office 365 domain and testing connectivity to the new domain)
5. Creating and enforcing ActiveSync policies
6. Configuring certificate based authentication for Exchange 2010
7. Provisioning iOS client devices using the iPhone configuration utility
8. Sharing mailboxes and calendars
9. iOS client device management
If there's a flaw in this book, I think it is that it covers too much material in the opening chapters that is well documented elsewhere. Experienced administrators will likely skip the first four chapters before they discover the meat of the book in the last five as this is when Steve gets into the finer details of how to configure and manage iOS devices. Chapters 6, 7, and 9 will probably be the most useful as they cover details of Exchange that have not received a comprehensive treatment elsewhere.
This isn't a huge book and its content is very accessible. All in all, well worth a browse, even perhaps using the Kindle application on an iPod. You never know when that VP of Operations insists that their iPad simply must be connected in a secure manner!
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