Passed 70-697

culpano

This is my eighth Microsoft certification and I swear if I do a hundred more exams there will not be one as difficult as this - it was an absolute nightmare. I took the 4 re-takes option but fortunately passed first time with 768. Some of the questions were a bit ambiguous and I felt a bit unfair. I was so mentally shattered at the end I didn't bother giving feedback. I took the whole 2 hours. I had three minutes left when I was on the penultimate question. Already resigned to failure I expected the last question to be an IP subnetting one and I wouldn't have had time to work out the subnets but instead I got an awful question on Bitlocker. I really struggled with the remote app stuff and one of the questions on App-V was very harsh. It was so in depth and it's one where you need to be working in it full time. I mean you can't even download it to play around with unless you have a software assurance contract. Quite a few control panel questions. A couple on Windows Store for Business. As ksee noted in his post I've never heard of it ! The Intune questions were ok. I got one question on Branchcache (as did ksee) - it's not even in the objectives and it was a detailed question. I'm wondering if they plug in the fact I have got 70-680 config Windows 7 as that has Branchcache as a fair part of the objectives so they expect me to know it.

Anyway 2 months of no life....491 ITDVDS videos. The famous Mr Conrad on his CBT Nuggets - 99 videos watched 3 times, various Youtube videos, dipping into technet, Exam Ref and Windows 10 Inside book. I need a lie down.

Oh and thanks to AMD4EVER - I used the very handy bullet list cram just for the times I needed to just learn a few facts and not have to watch a load of videos or read extended text.

Piers

Congrats on the pass, now I'm REALLY not looking forward to this one.

culpano

Cheers. If you need any advice give me a shout. If you haven't started studying yet best bit of advice I can give you if you are going down the CBT Nuggets route is to do the videos very slowly, lab it and read it up. Do it again before moving onto next section. Don't go through them at breakneck speed then have to go through them again as it gets boring and you forget things. I would definitely recommend ITDVDS. I did the Windows 10 Admin course first (a few hundred short videos) to get an detailed overview of the system then I did the 70-697 course - again another vast amount of short videos. It doesn't actually cover everything (but most is there) but there is absolutely no waffle and lots of the videos are superb for labbing against. I wished I gone through them again more slowly before the exam but I ran out of time. These videos are also very inexpensive. If I had a choice of any video training company it would be CBT Nuggets - they are just the best imho.

drexman999

Congrats Culpano, a really great achievement. It sounds like it was a slog! I am a bit worried now as it's my first MS exam, I guess I'll just have to work harder on it. I'm using the Pluralsight stuff at the minute as I find it slightly more suited to newcomers.

I don't know if it's relevant for this exam, but in the CompTIA exams, they put non-scoring questions in there that aren't on the objectives. Apparently it's to help them spot for cheating.

Out of interest, how did you find Transcender? I was planning on using it as my main source of exem prep

MJK9550

Wow that sounds horrible, I plan on taking this exam fairly soon as well. Any study tips or points to focus on would be much appreciated. Congrats!

culpano

Eek. Sorry. Not trying to put people off this exam. The things I struggled with were the cloud stuff and remoteapp, remote desktop, App-V etc. Some of the questions were very obscure and for the first time in the eight exams I've taken I saw a couple of questions where I thought "I've not got a clue what they are talking about !". The hard thing is having to sign up to so many subscriptions to test stuff. Best advice is do the CBT Nuggets videos (and Pluralsight) slowly and really try to understand it. For Intune, sign up for the trial and keep going through all the menus and options. Manage a mobile phone with it (I trashed mine !!!) and manage a PC with it. Make sure you set up a Hyper-V network with a Windows Server 2012 R2 DC and one or two Windows 10 Enterprise clients to lab most things.

DAVIS NGUYEN

Congrats!

AMD4EVER

Congrats on the pass!! I'm glad my notes are helping people out

I agree with this test being extremely difficult especially because it is so hard to get hands on access to the products that they want you to learn. Very glad that you passed!

culpano

Cheers a lot.

greg9891

Congrats !