70-417 Lab Guide: Suggestions?

Hey TE!

I've been studying the 70-417 materials via CBT Nuggets, and want to find a good lab guide that walks through all the exam objectives.
My Sybex book has some exercises, but it's huge and I want something more to the point (just the labs).

I found this page: Windows Server 2012 "Early Experts" Challenge that says they'll send out a 70-417 guide, but the page looks to be dead and I dont find anywhere to actually signup and get the guide.

Does anyone have this and would be willing to share?

Thank you.

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poolmanjim

I haven't found a truly comprehensive lab guide for any of the individual exams, much less the combined objectives that is the 417. I can comment on what I did and how it worked for me.

I watched Pluralsight videos and did everything I could to duplicate their labs. I remember only having issues copying the ADFS and the DirectAccess stuff. Beyond that I looked at the objectives published by Microsoft. I tried to lab each exam objective at least a little. You learn a lot from the continued failures of effectively writing your own course material. You see errors and messages and screens that the lab guides wouldn't necessarily take you through. In addition to that, I used the MOAC books for a couple of parts and ended up following along with the labs they provided as they weren't too bad. There is a supplement book to those that is a lab guide but I haven't used it.

Note: There isn't a MOAC course for the 417. You would have to grab the guides/books for each of the individual exams.

Lastly, you can always opt for labs provided by a third party. Microsoft has their free technet virtual labs which are okay. I used Boson labs for my 412 exam to make some sense of the AD FS stuff that was in there. It ended up being helpful.

417 Objectives List (Skills Measured Section)
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/learning/exam-70-417.aspx

410 MOAC Lab Guide
https://www.amazon.com/Installing-Configuring-Microsoft-Official-Academic/dp/1118882296/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1487862933&sr=8-1&keywords=microsoft+official+academic+course+70-410+lab

Technet Virtual Labs
https://vlabs.holsystems.com/vlabs/technet?eng=VLabs&auth=none&src=microsoft.holsystems.com&altadd=true&labid=10845

AvgITGeek

What problems did you have with the ADFS and DirectAccess stuff? Curious because I'm in the process of studying for the 412, finished my lab setup (18 VMs!) a couple days ago and just started the videos and TechNet. I always lab after the videos. I don't want to get up to ADFS to find out it doesn't work.

poolmanjim

With ADFS it is because of the whole "claims aware" aspect. You need to have an existing claims aware app to fully test the implementation and verify it actually works. I'm not much of a developer so it wasn't really an option. I think there are other ways to do it but I didn't want to waste too much time figuring those out. I focused on studying it and labbing what parts I could and it ended up being enough. I also never got Worplace Join to work. Not sure why.

DirectAccess was mostly due to lab limitations. For some aspects of DirectAccess you have to have an external publicly routable IP for DA to work. I never had my lab connected to the internet at that point so DA wasn't much of an option.

AvgITGeek

Ah. Thanks for that poolmanjim.

Pseudonym

I've found with the more difficult to lab technologies, there tends to be a shift to more of a broad overview, rather than in depth knowledge of configuration. That was certainly the case when I studied ADFS/Direct Access for 640/642. So, I wouldn't worry too much about getting those working.

poolmanjim

I think you are right Psudonym. It seems that for some of the harder or more obscure stuff the questions become about the overall technology and not the nitty-gritty how-to, though don't be surprised if you see some of that.

I know with DirectAccess my company has PFE who even throws his hands up sometimes because some of it is just strange in how it works.

Pseudonym

After looking through some threads about 70-686, I found that the OP is a brain dumper. So I hope you fail.