Month: January 2012

Office 365 Exams Continued…

Yesterday I took both exams and in my opinion they were tough! I’m MCITP on Exchange and SharePoint, work with those products a lot, work with Office365 a lot, I deliver the Ignite-In-A-Box Trainings for Office365 but these exams are tough, I tell you.

The firts one, “Deploying Office 365” was pretty much as I expected it to be, I commented on about 20% of the questions, which can be of course the diffenence between a Pass or a No-Pass. Looking at “skills being measured” afterwards I think that that section covers it: know your interface and walk along all possible settings. Microsoft sometimes tends to ask strange questions, not really out of the real world but it might be an option and, the question is being asked!

The seocnd one, “Adminstering Office 365” took me about 2 hours to finish, that is a long exam… I had a lot more comments on that one. You know the feeling, the correct answer is not there! but than again, they don’t ask for the CORRECT answer, they ask for the BEST answer!
For this exam I really agree, you need at least one year of hands on experience, and be very familiar with Exchange 2010, SharePoint 2010, Unified Messaging and Lync, DNS, AD, PKI, AD FS 2.0 and Directory Synchronization. For all those products, prepare your lab environment for failure and fix it!

Now the long wait has started, maybe until April 4th, maybe sooner; my results. I guess a PASS for the first one and a NO PASS for the second one.

Good Luck to all of you taking these exams!

Office365 Exams

So, it seems that as of April 4th Microsoft Office 365 Exams will be available; the beta, with corresponding beta-exam numers (071-321 and 071-323) are available NOW until the end of January or until all seats are filled up.
A true Microsoft track consisting of a Microsoft Certified Technolgy Specilaist series exam:
Exam 70-321: MCTS Deploying Office 365
and a Microsot Certified IT Professional series exam:
Exam 70-323: MCITP Administering Office 365
The skills being measured can be found at:
http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/exam.aspx?ID=70-321&Locale=en-us#tab2
http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/exam.aspx?ID=70-323&Locale=en-us#tab2

That is quit a long list and it’s hard to differentiate between “Deploying” and “Administering” . My guess as an experienced exam taker is that for the first one you need to know which button is where and for het latter one you will need to know when and why you should hit a certain button.

There is no preparation material available just yet, it will be there soon. For now, there is lots of stuff on http://community.office365.comand other places on the Internet. And, as a Microsoft Certified Trainer I say: Just do the work! Get yourself some Trial Accounts, set up some labs, buy yourself one or two certificates and domain names and do it.

I delivered a couple of 4 day Ignite-In-A-Box Trainings and practise is really a better way to prepare then reading some whitepapers or abstracts.
Later this week I will take both exams and I will let you know if the content of “the skills being measured” is accurate. Of course there is a Non-Disclosure-Agreement on Microsoft Exams so don’t you count on me to put up a braindump or extract of the exams up here. You do the work yourself, okay?

Enjoy the work and Good Luck on YOUR Exam(s)!