TrainSignal Video series on Exchange 2007
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.  ¶ 10:45 PM