Test Scheduled 12-6

CoryS

I was going to do my 293 but I deviated as I have been labbing Exchange for the last month hard and using the beta on and off for a while now. I have heard alot of powershell command questions are on there so hopefully I can reason them out as I doubt I will have everything memorized that they are looking for..

I am using "How to **** at Configuring Exchange Server 2007" which is a very good read since its made for humans.

Microsoft Exchange 2007 Unleashed , reading online at Safari, its been pretty good and in depth, I think there are a few errors however but overall it seems good more for concepts and not EMS.

Most importantly, spending hours reading the get-help * area of the powershell... This to me is pretty much the only way you will be able to learn in a way that suits you well. I currently have a lab at home and at work, for a machine at home I am using a 3800+ with 2 gigs of ram and have 2 instances of Exchange running using VMWare, it works well since theres not alot hitting it other then me

I will let you know how I do... Hopefully I will come out a new MCSA/MCTS

CoryS

Got somewhere in the mid 800s if I remember correctly, thought I would post a quick review..

There is alot of powershell. So advice for studying, without hopefully going to far, review the most obvious for each of the roles inside and out. Otherwise just play around in a lab, setup an edge box, work with queues and the like and you will be fine.

I used this as my elective so I got my MCSA.. Back to the 293.

royal

Good job Cory. You are definitely right about a lot of Powershell. Some of the cmdlets even went into which switches you would use. There are a lot of commands as well as a ton of switches that can be used for those commands, so it could make studying for the 70-236 look very tedious. My recommendation for people who are pursuing 70-236, is to go through the cmdlets at the very least and understand what they are used for. Do a quick look through the switches and see if there are any guides on any Exchange websites/blogs for that specific command. If there are, it's a good idea to go through common scenarios with that cmdlet, and there's a good change that blog/website will have commonly used switches for that command.

CoryS

You know, I'll be honest and say I was disappointed on the emphasis they put on the switches, imo the level of depth on some of them was a bit rediculous and can only guess if I got those right. From what I recollect it was either really easy with basic setup/use of Exchange in a lab, or very lengthy and biased to a select few who had encountered very specific scenarios. In either case, it was a decent learning experience. Thanks for the congrats.

Have you sat on the 237 or 238 yet?

sprkymrk

Congrats on the pass.

royal

CoryS wrote:

Have you sat on the 237 or 238 yet?

You know, I feel like I can just walk in and take those 2 exams with flying colors as I have been designing multi-site Exchange 2007 deployments for the last several months and been configuring them as well. I'm the type that will always wait for a dedicated book on the exam to make sure I'm covering all my bases so I don't waste my company's $125 for an exam failure.

There's a consolidated 70-237/8 book coming out in January. I'm going to get it when it's released, read through it real quick, make sure all my bases are covered, and then go take it. I'm in no rush.

royal

Ok, I lied. I have 70-237 scheduled for Friday.

royal

Ok, my review is that 70-237 is extremely easy. I'll need to brush up for 238 though as I hear it's a beast.

CoryS

I like those kind of reviews

I actually keep reading that as well. In order of difficulty out of 5

236 ***

237 *

238 ****


Congrats on the pass... Any sims?

royal

Nope, no sims. A lot of questions about co-existence between Exchange 2003 and Exchange 2007. So read up on that section on TechNet. Know what roles Exchange 2003 can take advantage of. For instance, when you install a CAS, you can use that instead of a FE for client access. Of course if a FE is an SMTP bridgehead, you'll want to deploy either an Edge/HTS first, etc.... A lot of those kinds of questions.

royal

70-238 scheduled for Tuesday @ 12pm CST

CoryS

Good luck royal! Make sure and report back if its as tough as people are saying!