Jims' Network Diary – musings of a network admin

As mentioned in a previous post, I have the retake for the 70-662 booked; this is late in February. However, I’m planning on taking the MCSA 2003 upgrade exam, the 70-648, first.

I’ve given myself a very short timescale for this, from the last week of December until halfway through January. I’m using a variety of resources for this, including the trusty CBT Nuggets series. I’ve got these for quite a few exams now, and they’re definitely my preference over reading from a 3 inch thick book!

My technique for these videos is to watch them all through first, and then watch them a second time, noting down any exam-specific tips that the instructor gives, in the notes, and highlighting them. This is a great way of picking out specific areas to focus on. For me, the DRM protection is an issue – my iPhone (and Palm Pre before that) doesn’t support WMA files, and they’re DRM protected, so I can’t use them for the train / tube when I work in the London office.

I do have the Microsoft Training Kit for the exam in e-book format saved on my phone – bought this from the Apple App Store for £5.99 – a massive saving on the hard copy of the book and much more portable. I’ve also bought a test exam from the App store – this is slightly flawed (IMHO) in that you have to go through all 100 questions before getting a score – most test engines I’ve tried allow you to choose how many questions they’ll contain.

The exam is very soon so time will tell if such a short timescale in combination with the above study measures is effective.

Went on an intense 6-day Exchange 2010 course during December – we’re in the process of moving to a new Windows 2008 R2 native domain, complete with new Exchange 2010 Organisation so I needed some formal training.

The course included the two exams needed to achieve the “MCTIP: Enterprise Messaging Administrator” certification – the 70-662 (TS) and 70-663 (PRO).

The biggest thing to note for people taking the 70-662 exam is the sheer volume of questions related to PowerShell commands – the instructor estimated 20-40% and I’d say it was definitely in the upper end of the range. Having never used PowerShell before, and not covered it nearly enough during the 5 days before the 662 exam, I found myself unprepared for it and bombed it rather miserably ;(

The 663 is a different story – it focusses more on how Exchange integrates with the rest of your infrastructure, strategies for installing which roles where, etc etc. It calls much more on experience with a Microsoft Infrastructure, so I was very pleased to pass it.

I’ve re-booked the 662, but as a result of a very specific requirement at work, have chosen to focus first on upgrading my MCSA to Server 2008 – TS (the 70-648) first. That’s another post though.