70-284 and 70-285

hollow666

So I have 70-284 and 70-285 scheduled next week and was wondering how much in depth I would need to know supporting multiple exchange organziations across forest boundaries? Do I need to go in depth such as the resource kit or do I just need to know basic fundamentals. Also from the gist of other's post it seems like co-existance,migrating,and upgrading legacy messaging systems will be appearing quite frequently. What practice exams did everyone use for 70-285? So far I've been sticking with only the official microsoft books/practice exams for all my MS related certifications. IS the measureup 70-285 worth the $$$?

Slowhand

I haven't taken either, but I can tell you that, if you're not wrapping up your studies by now, you probably should reschedule the exams. There's no harm in pushing them back in order to be better prepared.

hollow666

I'm throughly prepared. Just wanted to get a feel for how in depth cross organziational support might pop up.I honestly doubt 99 percent of the people taking both of these exams have in-depth knowledge or working experience of deploying microsoft identity integration server across an enterprise but you never know what some test writer might decide to throw at you.

royal

Just know what IIFP/MIIS and InterOrg Replication Tool is and you'll be fine.

hollow666

Thanks!

hollow666

Just passed 70-284 with a 838. Not the best score but a pass is a pass. Test crashed around 4 times. Plenty of time to complete the exam had around an hour left and didn't even bother going back to review my answers. Around 50 questions no sims. This test was a breeze compared to my last exam 70-297. My test crashed around 15 times that exam and I felt rushed for time. Didn't help with all the crashing interrupting my train of thought. Anyways I had to reschedule my 70-285 for a week and a half in the future because I had a conference call with a vendor I couldn't get out of. Definitely going to try to find a decent practice exam just to get back into the "Design exam" frame of mind.

rjbarlow

Congrats. Have You any suggestion for who has in mind to take this exam, without breaking the NDA?

TY.

hollow666

Well my suggestion is that if you don't have alot of cluster experience and running exchange in a front-end/backend topology its time to build a test lab. What I did was load up 5 pcs at work and rig one with a scsi card and and a scsi drive. I did a single node cluster on that pc and rigged up a simple front-end/backend. You will have to use scsi because cluster service will not work with sata drives. Other than those two things clustering and front-end/back-end the rest of the topics i seen were pretty standard exchange info. Storage groups, message tracking, installing etc..... alot of people told me there was lots of legacy 5.5 info but I seen very little. You do not need to worry about installing exchange 5.5 in a lab or supporting mulitple exchange orgs across forest boundaries just read about them.

danclarke

838 is an excellent score for 70-284. I'm envious. Congratulations!

hollow666

Can't wait to see what 70-285 is like. I'm not really fans of the design exams after 70-297.

rjbarlow

Cool, grats again and good luck for Your next steps.

blargoe

I hope you're OK with general TCP/IP and Microsoft-specific DNS stuff, they do throw some of that into 285..

hollow666

Well I have my MCSE so I doubt I'll see anything about DNS I haven't seen a billion times already

HeroPsycho

MCSE doesn't tend to ask much about MX records.