How to learn Exchange?

Every now and then we get an onslaught of newbies coming into the SBS world and trying to learn about Exchange. Unfortunately, they try to learn in the exact opposite way than the way Exchange is supposed to be deployed. Notice the word deployed, not installed. You install Office, you tweak around ribbons, clippies, chm files and you eventually figure it out. If you don’t, you clear the profile and try again.

Servers are different folks. There is a lot of planning involved. You need to learn. You need to consider the things below the surface before you start your building. That means understanding infrastructure. Understanding topology. Understanding permissions. Understanding protocols.

Understanding is not something we are born with. It takes education, layer upon layer of core competencies, experience good and bad. No matter how much Microsoft lies to you, these are not attainable in a day. No, you can’t get them from a two week boot camp and four letter acronyms do not equate to a competency. So where does one even start?

First, read about Exchange deployment, configuration, troubleshooting, etc. There are many great books, most of which you could read online in the comfort of your laptop from safari.com for $15 a month.
http://safari.oreilly.com/

Get familiar with Exchange team and ongoing developments:
http://blogs.technet.com/exchange

Find out how the SBS team is integrating it:
http://blogs.technet.com/sbs
and troubleshooting it:
http://blogs.technet.com/petergal

Look at a number of great SBS books.

Finally, go to TechNet virtual labs to get hands-on experience with Exchange:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/traincert/virtuallab/exchange.mspx

For the most part, Exchange is a solid product that breaks very quickly with a hacked-up network (dynamic DNS, port blocking, high latency) so trying to learn against those odds will be very frustrating. I have customers that spend their entire days banging their head against the wall with Exchange problems that have nothing to do with Exchange and everything to do with the connection and topology. You will save yourself a lot of time and your clients a lot of productivity if you went through the resources above instead of tzo/dyndns/etc.