70-294 First?

japlasma

Hello All,
I'm new to the forums and happy to be part of such a great community of brains.
My Goal is to be MCSE certified in 5 months and along with other help materials, I hope to pick on the expertise of everyone in these forums.
My first question is: Is it suicidal to tackle the 294 exam first? Has anybody done that? And if so, what was your experience and would you advice for or against that approach?
The MS publication book I'm reading is a fairly good book and I enjoy reading it more than the other core exam books. I don't work directly in Active directory, but I'm one of the administrators of our Organization unit. Also, I want this exam first because it may open immediate doors for a different job.
Any ideas/advice would be very much appreciated.
Thank you very much for reading this.

royal

Personally, I feel that doing your entire MCSE in 5 months is a bad idea. Of course, there are many things that may influence my feelings towards that. For example, working in the field for several years would make me feel that doing your MCSE in 5 months is sufficient as you have had the experience. Also, I would advise you to follow the curriculum set forth on Microsoft's website. You can see the curriculum for the MCSE Server 2003 series here. The only change I would make is doing the 70-270 exam first. This is because it is the client exam. It will teach you fundamentals such as NTFS/Share permissions, Encrypting File System, Compression, basic server knowledge/terms, and more. For your elective, I have always felt that doing the 70-284 exam is the best way to go. Most organizations who have a Microsoft Windows based network, often use Exchange Server for their messaging infrastructure. Having some knowledge behind how an organization's messaging infrastructure operates is very beneficial.

Now for a direct answer to your question regarding doing 70-294 first, yes it is definitely possible. I still advise you to follow the track with doing 70-270 first and then proceeding with the rest of the server exams in order. This is what the majority of people do, for a good reason. Deviating away from that is not bad, I just feel that it is not optimal.

Good luck to whatever you decide to do.