Well, I had a long drought since my last exam in 2011... but that is me, I tend to binge on exams.
Passed 70-341 today and the exams just seem so long anymore, even though it wasn't really too bad.
I didn't study for it, but that is because I have significant experience with Exchange in enterprise environments and have been eyeballs deep in the Exchange 2013 trenches for over a year, now... and plenty of every version since 5.5.
Since I never even really reviewed the "Skills measured" prior to sitting the exam, I was kind of shocked about some of the topics covered... so I pulled this from the "Skills measured" (
https://www.microsoft.com/learning/en-us/exam-70-341.aspx):
"
Administer Exchange workload management
- - Configure user workload policies; configure system workload policies; monitor system workload events; monitor user workload events"
Wow, I can't believe that! These features are "deprecated" but not yet removed, as of CU6 (https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj150503(v=exchg.150).aspx):
"Managing workloads by monitoring the health of system resources on the Exchange servers in your organization should only be done under the direction of Microsoft Customer Service and Support."
As a matter of fact, a Microsoft Customer Support & Service employee for Microsoft Exchange had this to write about the topic (http://blogs.technet.com/b/benw/archive/2015/01/30/workload-management-in-exchange-2013.aspx):
"That is all fine and good (after all, I work in CSS!). But for a while, even I didn’t know how to view what the current settings were!!!"
It seems like Microsoft is even further behind on the exams that ever before. While I think the interface has greatly improved and the scenarios are great... many of the questions are extremely awkward and don't really represent all of reality. Further, many of the topics are going to rarely be used by at least 80% of the Exchange admins/engineers out there... some I have used, but they are concepts for which I am aware and I dig back into the documentation when I need to use them.
Nevertheless, I passed and I will be going on to 70-342... perhaps I will take the online proctored version tonight if I can get registered for it!
