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Updates and Solutions

  TrainSignal Video series on Exchange 2007
      Wednesday, July 9, 2008

I guess I should have posted about this a few months ago, but last fall I spent a lot of time developing an Exchange 2007 video course for TrainSignal. The course ended up over 21 hours long, and I think I did a solid job on it.

The target audience is beginning Exchange admins and admins who have some Exchange 2003 experience but lack deep experience with Exchange 2007. The new version of Exchange is quite different from previous versions: the management experience is radically different, and the architecture has changed a lot too. One of the main things that is close to being the same is the database, but I've found that a lot of people who are administering Exchange servers don't know much about that anyway, regardless of what version we're looking at. So of course, I gave the database significant attention.



In this course, I created a fictional company, and the viewer and I are the consultants hired to implement a full Exchange 2007-based solution. In each video we have some objectives that have been given to us by company management, and we work through accomplishing those goals and testing them. Sometimes I take a bit of time out and go over some architecture so that we understand what it is we are doing, but the majority of the videos is spent working with the Exchange Management Console, working with PowerShell commandlets, and even working with GoDaddy, Digicert, DNS consoles, Active Directory and our router console to get things done.

One fun thing is that several of the people who have viewed the videos have actually contacted me to ask questions about configurations, and in some cases I've even worked on several projects with them. I like getting to know my audience.

Right now I'm working on another TrainSignal video that will cover more advanced Exchange 2007 backup and recovery topics. We'll be covering the difference between doing backups on Server 2003 vs Server 2008, we'll be looking at how to set up Data Protection Manager, and how to do several different types of restores, from mailbox to full server. We'll finish up with a detailed discussion of clustering options, but we won't actually be able to set up multi-server clusters. I did cover Local Continuous Replication in some depth in my original video, but full clustering coverage is beyond the scope of this upcoming video.
 
Comments:
You really did a GREAT job in this video. I am the only IT person in a midsized company with 70 users.
I bought the complete MS training package when I was installing our new Exchange 2007 server.

I take a chapter or two every day when the users lets me alone for a while.

It has brought me so much. I am a "learning by doing" guy and your course has been giving me som much knolege about Exchange 2007 that I feel very confident now.

Today I've been listening to your voice for hours :-) It was the backup and restore chapters.

I was really laughing when I in the middle of one of the chapters could hear a little yawn :-)

I also like that when something goes wrong, youre not editing to show a perfect world. You really show it and the troubleshooting afterwards.

I am looking forward to you advanced course.

Br
Steen
 
Hi, I'm currently learning exchange using your video and I like it since it's not always working and you explain what happen when something didn't work the first time. Since we're a small company with very limited budget it was out of question to pay 300$+/year for the UC (SAN) certificate so I found http://certificatesforexchange.com/ selling multi-domain certificate for 60$/year wich was much more acceptable but I encoutered a problem when trying to import the certicate into exchange I always had this error: " Import-ExchangeCertificate : The source data cannot be imported or the wrong password was specified. " The problem was that unlike the digicert in your video they do provide with a filename.p7b but it's only the intermediate certificate not the full package once you have imported the intermediate certificate from the mmc console you have to import the filename.crt file in exchange. If you need more detail look at this godaddy UCC certificate installation page it work the same way http://help.godaddy.com/article/4877 Maybe this will help someone in the future and congrats again on a very nice job.
 
Hey, thanks for the feedback from both of you.

Steen, I usually only get a quiet time to record late at night, so I'm usually creating video content between 11pm and 2am, so there are usually yawns here and there that I have to edit out. Also, I remember from my classroom teaching that the best stuff comes out of the problems, and the smoother things go, the less likely you'll come away with something. Given that, I try not to over-rehearse stuff too much. I want it to happen like it would if I was working on a consulting gig, and you were sitting there next to me. Sometimes if the problems get too complex, I'll pause the video and do some reading, but usually I'm able to figure things out without taking too long.

I'm just finishing up the backup and recovery course tonight, so it should actually be available within a week.

Cividan - Thanks for the kind feedback. You're right, different registrars handle certs differently. Some don't need to issue intermediate certs, and even the ones that do don't always do it in quite the same way. I've deployed a lot of GoDaddy certs, and they are different than the Digicert ones. Someone's always out there making life interesting!
 
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