Hereunder you’ll find some of my thoughts (and feelings) on both Office 365 beta exams that I took earlier today.
I’m a UC guy and mostly busy with Exchange, Lync and Active Directory. Because I have been warned by some colleagues about the difficulty of the exam (http://thecloudmouth.com/2012/01/10/first-impressions-of-the-office-365-beta-exams/), I made sure to go through the SharePoint Online part at least one more time before taking a shot at the exam… And although I have been delivering quite some Office 365-ignite trainings for Microsoft, it did not get me very far…
Honestly said, this was one of the most difficult Microsoft exams that I took to date. But for some reason it doesn’t really surprise me. Not because I’ve been “warned”, but rather because Office 365 is really about more than a single product. It’s about Exchange, about Lync, about SharePoint and about the platform itself and you cannot expect Microsoft to lower their expectations towards certifications, just because more than one product is involved, can you?
I definitely agree with some of comments that I’ve read all over the net: you need at least one year experience with Office 365 in all of its aspects: Exchange, Lync, SharePoint, ADFS, … Just having a theoretical knowledge about it won’t get you there, you’ll need hands-on experience. The depth of some questions is crazy. But perhaps I just say that because I’m not really a SharePoint guy…
I guess that – if luck is on my side – the first exam (“deployment”) will be a PASS. The second one (“managing”) on the other hand, I flunked for sure.
For those out there that still need to take the exam: GOOD LUCK!
If you need some resources on SharePoint Online, I can certainly recommend the following page:
I took the Deploying exam. I was surprised because most of the questions were more related to managing sharepoint and managing from powershell.
Anyway what should I expect in the next Administering exam? What should I concentrate more on?
Hi Marius,
Make sure that you dake a deeper look into the SharePoint-part for the administration-exam as well. I had lots of question about it.
As I wrote in the article; you definitely need to know your way around the administration panel and settings if you want to pass the exam(s).
Grts,
Michael