Passed 70-663

With a 769. I am a little dissapointed in the score as I thought I was going to do about 100 points better, but a pass is a pass. There were more questions than I expected, and they were more complicated than the straightforward questions I remember from the 662 over a year ago.

I haven't touched Exchange in a year as my company has had me working on Windows 7 deployment projects. I really want to get back to Exchange consulting, but there are more Win7 projects on the horizon for me.

I am out of Win7 exams though, so my next test is the 693 for the MCITP:VA. I only get credit towards my bonus for 3 exams a year, but I have no idea what I will take for the 3rd test. I'm running out of exams that benefit and interest me. Hopefully the Server 2012 beta exams will be out next year so I have something on which to focus.

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Dakinggamer87

Congrats on pass!!

peakbagger66

Congratulations, Claymoore. Would you say it was easier or harder than the 70-662? Was it "higher level" stuff or more technical?

As far as consulting goes, I wish I could specialize in Exchange and do only that. Certainly one of favorite MS technologies!

jibbajabba

I'd say if you study Exchange 2010 properly, you could potentially pass both in one go. I found 662 harder as sa lot of the 663 questions I was able to answer with common sense really. Maybe that is because I read

Amazon.com: Exchange Server 2010 Administration: Real World Skills for MCITP Certification and Beyond (Exams 70-662 and 70-663) (9780470624432): Joel Stidley, Erik Gustafson: Books

which covers both. There were some nasty ones in 663, that's for sure, but they are based on material which isn't even in any book or blueprint so I guess they are thrown in as 'beta' or something. But I think that is as far as I can go without being in breach of the NDA.

Whether it is higher level or technical - depends what you consider higher level

Claymoore

peakbagger66 wrote: »

Congratulations, Claymoore. Would you say it was easier or harder than the 70-662? Was it "higher level" stuff or more technical?

Harder, but that is because I thought 662 was one of the easiest Exchange exams I have taken. It was higher level because you have to understand how to put several pieces together to identify the correct answer. For example, you know that DAGs make mailboxes highly available and you expect to see some questions about DAGs on the 662. Now you need to throw in CAS Arrays, Edge servers, Global Catalogs and hardware load balancers to create an overall HA solution.

I agree with Gomjaba that both exams could be done in the same day.

I started out reading Exchange 2010 Best Practices, but switched to Exchange 2010 Inside Out as my primary text. I also used the resources in my Resource Guide.

My company has a Transcender subscription that I rarely use, but I downloaded the 663 test. I got an 80% on my first test on Monday and decided to schedule the exam. I planned to take it Friday and spend the week working on weak areas, but only a couple slots on Wednesday were open. I decided to take it earlier instead of waiting a couple of weeks until I returned from a project.

peakbagger66

Thanks for the pointers to the texts, guys. We have Best Practices and Inside Out, but not Real World. I will check these out.

Also have access to the Trainsignal and Nuggets videos for 70-663. I hope these are helpful. I thought Trainsignal was really well done for the 70-662, but as with any video, if that's all you have you will surely fail

.

Now that we've met our exam goals to maintain our Partnership, I am no longer under the gun and I can take my sweet time with this one. There were a lot of interesting technologies I had wanted to explore but I just didn't have the time to look into them. Now I do!

jibbajabba

peakbagger66 wrote: »

Thanks for the pointers to the texts, guys. We have Best Practices and Inside Out, but not Real World. I will check these out.

Also have access to the Trainsignal and Nuggets videos for 70-663. I hope these are helpful. I thought Trainsignal was really well done for the 70-662, but as with any video, if that's all you have you will surely fail .

Now that we've met our exam goals to maintain our Partnership, I am no longer under the gun and I can take my sweet time with this one. There were a lot of interesting technologies I had wanted to explore but I just didn't have the time to look into them. Now I do!

I thought Microsoft Partner requires MCITP:MA and not just the MCTS ?
Might of course be different between the competencies ...

Claymoore

Both the silver and gold competencies require the MCITP:EMA, but only the EMA 2010 counts towards the Gold. Silver and Gold also both require voice exams, either OCS 2007 or Lync 2010.

https://partner.microsoft.com/global/program/competencies/40125158

I thought I read that a company only needs to employ 2 masters, but I read this to say that you need 4 masters or 4 MCITPs.

peakbagger66

Gomjaba wrote: »

I thought Microsoft Partner requires MCITP:MA and not just the MCTS ?
Might of course be different between the competencies ...

It depends on the competency. We do have an MCITP:SA on staff now (as it was, he just needed one more exam to complete). For Midmarket Gold we also needed two MCTS: Platform with 4 exams each (hence the 4 in my sig

) from a list of qualifying exams that MS specifies. I think it changes according to the competency.

We also hit Silver Desktop and Gold ISV. Gold ISV did not require an MCITP but a software product that is Microsoft Certified.

LCA

Good pass Claymoore, well done!

jibbajabba

peakbagger66 wrote: »

It depends on the competency. We do have an MCITP:SA on staff now (as it was, he just needed one more exam to complete). For Midmarket Gold we also needed two MCTS: Platform with 4 exams each (hence the 4 in my sig ) from a list of qualifying exams that MS specifies. I think it changes according to the competency.

We also hit Silver Desktop and Gold ISV. Gold ISV did not require an MCITP but a software product that is Microsoft Certified.

We got the Gold Hosting and Gold Server Platform and a few more others I can't remember