I need to spend some time going over the exchange 2013 books myself, I've deployed countless exchanges up through 2010, but 2013 just seems to have endemic issues, like sharepoint. You've got to dig in and change things before it'll even begin to work properly.
On a fresh exchange 2013 install, I couldn't even get the EAC to come up until I'd installed the service packs, all I was getting was "Something went wrong, sorry :-(", no messages to help along the way.
I liked the old exchange console :<