Microsoft Learning have launched a new central certification website for all your needs as a Microsoft Certified Professional, Trainer or Office Specialist:

http://www.microsoft.com/learning/members/

This is essentially a starting point: at the top of the page you will see “tabs” for each the three different branches’ own micro-sites. This provide more consistency between the three sites, as well as making sure that you can easily take advantage of all offers, discounts or services which apply to your particular specialist area or areas.

From what I have seen of the MCT and MOS ones (which I am most interested and involved in) they are great little pages full of all the links you need to all the resources you want, and some that you may need and did not even know about.

Included are links to the logo builder pages, how to download or order a certificate, create an online virtual business card or update the profile information which Microsoft holds about you (including which newsletters and updates you receive by email).

This is not a replacement for lots of the resources which already existed, such as Born To Learn, or the MCPeStore, or to view or share your transcript; rather it is a single page to go to which brings links to all those resources together in one place.

Don’t overlook the links at the top of the page directly below the tabs (you can get to these by hovering over each tab, or once you have clicked on a tab the ones for that section stay visible.

If you have ever passed a Microsoft exam and want to continue certification as part of your career or personal development, go and check out the Microsoft Certified Members’ site today.

It seems that Microsoft have listened to the community and brought back their Second Shot offer much earlier than most people expected. Previously this seemed to run only once each year (albeit for several months at a time), and the last one only closed for taking exams the first time round at the end of May and the retakes by the end of June. Re-opening this in August 2008 and leaving it open right through to June 2009 seems to indicate that this will effectively become a permanent fixture, but you can’t just roll your retakes forward forever, you will have to use the second chance within the year-long programme, which seems perfectly fair.

The same launch page is being used as last time, although until today this was not live for the new offer and still showed the old information.

Microsoft Second Shot Exam Offer 2008

You have until June 30, 2009, to register, obtain an exam voucher, complete your first exam and retake your exam (if you did not pass on your first attempt).

There is no limit per person: If you register for this offer, you will receive one free retake for each paid exam that you take and fail.

To take advantage of this offer:

• Step 1: Register for Second Shot on the Microsoft Web site and receive an exam voucher number.

• Step 2: Schedule and pay for your initial exam through the Prometric Web site, call center, or test center.
  Note You must have the voucher number before you register.

• Step 3: Take the exam.

• Step 4: If you do not pass the exam on your first attempt, register for your free retake exam through the Prometric Web site, call center,* or test center by using the same voucher number. Then, take your Second Shot!
  Note You must wait one day after taking your initial exam before you can register for your retake exam. This time is required to enter test results into the system.

Which exams qualify for this Second Shot offer?
Any Microsoft Learning IT professional, developer, or Microsoft Dynamics exam qualifies for this offer.

You have to register here, and for that you need a Windows Live ID / MS Passport / hotmail account. That said, I can’t get the registration process to go through at all right now, I’m getting an error on the page with three different browsers when I try to update my profile . I’ll be trying again later, as I have some exams on the horizon and this could be useful.

I have to make a choice though, since I have a whole bunch of exam vouchers (from various MS Press exam books and other sources) and the way this works you can’t use those and the 2nd shot ‘voucher’ code at the same time.

So I can use up a voucher (which is already paid for a while ago and therefore is “free” in terms of this month’s bank balance), or I can pay real money (88 GBP at the moment for most MCP exams) on the basis that if I fail I get a retake for free. I did this last time and passed, so I would have been better off using a voucher, in hindsight. Overall, I suspect Microsoft are simply trying to encourage more people to take exams without so much fear factor, although whether having even more people with a MS certificate devalues them for existing badge holders is an unanswerable question.

I agree with the comment made that the design exams do generally seem easier in some respects than the straight technical ones, as you don’t need to know the same level of detail of exactly how to do something in terms of making choices in a dialogue box.

On the other hand, the MS design exams do expect you to be able to take in, digest and interpret a load of business and technical requirements (some of the latter may only be implied from the former, some will be explicitly stated). The breadth of this is where the challenge lies in the real world, although the exam will often lead you in the right direction, rather than a blank sheet of paper on which to write an IT security plan. The nature of a computer-based exam does not lend itself to open questions; it would be very hard to make any kind of meaningful sense out of your answer to “How would you improve the security of the data for this organisation? (answer in no more than 200 words)”.

The other difference between these sort of exams and a real-world scenario is that in order to ensure there is a completely correct answer the requirements do not conflict. Sometimes one requirement might “trump” another, but will never directly oppose it. You won’t have the CEO saying that staff must not be required to carry anything for two-factor authentication while the CIO says all data must be encrypted and secured using smartcards. The reality of business is that overcoming these sort of conflicts is often the first hurdle for an IT manager to address through listening, discussion, understanding and education.

From a hardcore, old-school, hands-on technical point of view, this exam is not particularly challenging. It is really easy to say “just build a PKI infrastructure with subordinate CAs on every site, auto-enrol machines using Group Policy and then use IPSec to manage all access to secure data” – actually implementing such as plan is a bit more than an afternoon’s work, though!

Seeing the whole picture, understanding which bits of provided information are important and which less so, and knowing what can be done technically to address the needs is a different type of skill than the attention to detail needed for the technical exams. Much of this is learnt through experience, rather than from books. Reading widely around the subject at hand (security in this case, or Active Directory or Exchange design at enterprise level for those exams) and getting a feel for it from others is just as important.

In some ways, this design exam is a more realistic measure of your real ability to do this type of work than some of the technical exams. How many times have you had to learn some detail for an exam (such as the switches available for some command line tool), knowing that you have almost zero chance of ever needing that particular fact in your environment, and that if you ever did you would be able to look it up in minutes (most probably with a simple /?). Knowing that the tool exists, and the situations where it is used should be enough, and there seem to be too few exams which acknowledge this.

This learning of detail for its own sake is the reason why for me the 70-270 XP exam was one of the hardest to learn for. I have never done, and very likely never will do, an unattended (scripted) installation of Windows XP. I have used sysprep many times, creating “gold images” for cloning using tools such as Ghost, but never written an unattend.txt file. Yet for the exam I had to learn all the switches, what the files were called and where they were saved, and which one “won” if their configurations conflicted. To me, understanding the benefits and weaknesses of a variety of deployment methods is more important – should I be cloning? using RIS? writing unattend files and creating bootable install media? what advantages does Ghost multicast have over RIS? what disadvantages? how about SMS or SCCM? If I decide to use unattended installation, I can easily use reference books and internet resources to get the detail of how it is done. Knowing it is the right tool to use in the first place seems to me the bigger challenge.

In the end, I believe the design and technical exams share the same separation of skills as those of an architect and a builder. The architect needs to understand the building methods available and the benefits and limitations of them in order to be able to choose the appropriate ones for the required design to fit the customer brief from a two-bedroom house to a skyscraper or shopping mall. In doing so he will need to have some awareness of a whole range of trades such as building, plumbing, glazing, insulation, as well as understanding wider issues such as planning and environmental regulations. A builder has to implement the design through a deeper working knowledge and experience of actually laying bricks, pouring concrete or fitting steel structures together. A good builder will also be able to see the bigger picture and offer alternatives if his experience tells him that a better choice exists. The builder may also need to have some feel for where the plumbing will go or how the roof will be attached, but would not be expected to install the heating system or wire the alarms.

An IT team needs good builders, but without an architect who also understands the bigger picture, they will never get successful end-results, and somehow you have to be able to identify who has these skills and who does not.

The first section had 11 questions which was great as I had made loads of notes from the provided fictional case studies, and I sailed through with loads of time to spare. Unfortunately the format of these exams is that the time for each part is independent, so you don’t get to carry any spare time to the next set of questions and use it there. I had a couple of shorter sections where I maybe spent too long reading the materials and answered the last question with seconds to spare.

Overall I found this style of exam to be right up my street; taking in lots of information in a very short time and then applying my technical knowledge to this to come up with solutions to the business issues. Despite the rushed time on a couple of questions I came away with my best score to date on a Microsoft MCP exam, and won’t need to use my second chance to take this.

How do you find these design exams compare to the ‘normal’ technical ones?

Basically, you register for the deal with Microsoft, which gets you a voucher number. You then use this voucher number when you register and pay for your exam on the Prometric site as usual. If you fail the exam when you take it you can re-register to take the same exam again in a fixed timeframe.

The offer should be available from September 15th until January 31st, though whether that end-date is for the first try or your second attempt is not clear yet.

It seems that this will apply to all Microsoft professional and developer exams which are available through Prometric, but not Microsoft Office Specialist for example.

This offer will only be available from the 15th September, so you can’t register just yet, but there’s some information about the second shot offer on the Prometric website here which says:

Here’s how it works:

• Step 1: Register for Second Shot on the Microsoft site and receive an exam voucher number.
• Step 2: Using the voucher number, schedule and pay for your initial exam via Prometrics’s web site, call center or test center locations. (You must have the voucher number available prior to registering.)
• Step 3: Take your exam.
• Step 4: If you fail, register for your free retake exam via Prometric’s web site, call center or test center locations using the same voucher number. NOTE: Please wait one day after the failed exam to register to allow for test results to be entered into the system.

Thanks to Trika on her MS certification blog for giving us the advance warning of this coming up. It certainly avoids people being frustrated if they register for their exam the day before something like this gets announced. In another post she also talks about some of the changes following MS switching to using only Prometric for their exams now.

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