Within a year there probably will be enough books on Windows 2000 to fill a few aisles at the largest chain bookstore. Even now, so soon after its release, Windows 2000 is very well represented in print. And, not surprisingly, the publisher that got the biggest jump on this OS was Microsoft Press. Building Enterprise Active Directory Services: Notes from the Field is written by a collection of authors who are members of Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS). Thanks to the qualifications of its authors and the logical organization of the topics it addresses, this book is one of the best for people engineering the deployment of Active Directory (AD).
The best thing about this book is its collection of authors. Written almost like an anthology ("Best of MCS" would be a good alternative title), each of the book's chapters has a different author whose qualifications match the specific topic. This approach avoids the pitfall of so many books with wide-ranging agendas, but whose author is not equally expert in all areas addressed. Many of these writers have the benefit of working with the Windows 2000 development team. But their greatest advantage is that the MCS team worked with Microsofts early adopter customers, so they have more experience with AD than virtually anyone else (at least for now).
What also sets Building Enterprise Active Directory Services: Notes from the Field apart from many of the Win2K books now appearing is that it is properly organized for an AD planner. Most Win2K administration texts will work through the process of learning the operating system in a procedure-oriented fashion (i.e., chapter 1 will describe server installation, chapter 2 will show how to create user accounts, and so on). Building Enterprise Active Directory Services: Notes from the Field, on the other hand, is not in such a hurry to talk about using Windows 2000, but assumes that its readers have time to plan before they implement.
In fact, this book is intended not as a hands-on tutorial, but as a discussion of the issues that should be considered before implementing AD. Domain design and capacity planning (both directory database size and network traffic) are especially important, because some aspects of AD are hard to change once they are installed. A migration and integration section, the center of the book, offers insights into both the process of moving to AD and its coexistence with Unix, Netware, and applications. (This is one area of the book that really shows a bit too much Microsoft prejudice; it includes a chapter on integrating AD with Microsoft Exchange, but could have also addressed third-party email systems.)
The final section of the book contains chapters on scripting, security, and public-key infrastructure -- concerns usually considered later in the integration process. A CD-ROM included with the book contains tools appropriate for the books focus on integration planning: deployment and replication traffic spreadsheet templates, documentation, a directory sizing estimator, and utilities for simulating an operational server in a lab environment.
One of the book's shortcomings is that none of the case studies the authors write about recount the experiences of actual MCS clients. Chapters discuss Woodgrove Bank, Northwind Traders, and All-Terrain Trucking -- all fictional companies invented for this book. (Woodgrove and Northwind are also used in some of Microsofts Official Curriculum for Windows 2000 classes, so students may notice the same concerns stressed.) As a result, cynics may be skeptical of the authenticity of the books "solutions," since the authors controlled all conditions of the experiment.
Because the authors present fictional case studies, the book lacks the characterization and unpredictability that could be provided by real-world scenarios. The fictional case studies offer no comments from network administrators, no anecdotes about the unexpected concerns of quirky users, and no "war stories" about solving problems that crop up late at night. The books second chapter, on designing site topology, does deal with an actual corporation but it is written about Compaq by a Compaq employee who works with the MCS team. Unfortunately, its style is identical to the chapters that address fictional companies.
This is not to say that the fictional companies case studies are not informative; they are both illustrative and interesting. In fact, overall the book is quite well written, with a much more consistent style than you might expect of a volume with (at least) a dozen different authors. All of these writers have real-world experience -- they just arent recounting those genuine experiences. Building Enterprise Active Directory Services: Notes from the Field does a good job of presenting valuable lectures -- it's just too bad that every chapter is a lecture, not a story.
Building Enterprise Active Directory Services: Notes from the Field will be very useful to the many server administrators who are presently designing their organizations' Windows 2000 migration plans and/or utilization of AD. While its style is probably not compelling enough to keep readers awake at night, it contains invaluable information from some of the best technical sources, and it is organized in a much more logical fashion than many competing books on the market.
Author: Microsoft Consulting Services
Publisher: Microsoft Press
Date published: 2/2000
ISBN 0-7356-0860-1
$39.99
499 pages