Thoughts On Microsoft MCTS Training Insights

Thoughts On Microsoft MCTS Training Insights
As your research has brought you here it’s possible that you’d like to enter the world of computers and the MCTS Training has reared its head, or you’re already a professional and you know that you need the MCITP certification.


Be sure you check that your provider is definitely teaching with the latest level of Microsoft development. Many trainees have come unstuck when they discover they’ve been educated in an outdated version which now needs updating. A computer training organisation’s attention should primarily be on the best thing for their clients, and everyone involved should have a passion for what they do. Career study isn’t just about passing exams – the process should be all about helping you work out the best action plan for your future.

The way a programme is physically sent to you isn’t always given the appropriate level of importance. How many stages do they break the program into? What is the specific order and at what speed is it delivered? Delivery by courier of each element one piece at a time, taking into account your exam passes is the normal way of receiving your courseware. This sounds sensible, but you must understand the following: Maybe the order of study offered by the provider doesn’t suit. You may find it a stretch to finalise every element inside their defined time-scales?

Ideally, you’d get ALL the training materials right at the beginning – meaning you’ll have all of them for the future to come back to - as and when you want. Variations can then be made to the order that you move through the program where a more intuitive path can be found.

Wouldn’t it be great to know for sure that our jobs will always be secure and our work futures are protected, but the growing likelihood for most sectors throughout England at the moment is that there is no security anymore. Wherever we find rising skills shortages coupled with growing demand though, we always find a newly emerging type of security in the marketplace; driven by the constant growth conditions, organisations are struggling to hire enough staff.

The IT skills-gap throughout the UK currently stands at approximately twenty six percent, as noted by a recent e-Skills investigation. It follows then that for each 4 job positions that exist across computing, organisations can only source certified professionals for 3 of the 4. This fundamental reality clearly demonstrates an urgent requirement for more properly trained computing professionals across Great Britain. With the market growing at the speed it is, is there any other sector worth looking at for retraining.

A sneaky way that colleges make extra profits is by adding exam fees upfront to the cost of a course and then including an ‘Exam Guarantee’. It looks like a good deal, until you think it through:

It’s very clear we’re still paying for it – obviously it has been added into the full cost of the package supplied by the training company. It’s absolutely not free (although some people will believe anything the marketing companies think up these days!) Qualifying on the first ‘go’ is what everyone wants to do. Going for exams when it’s appropriate and funding them as you go has a marked effect on pass-rates – you prepare appropriately and think carefully about the costs.

Don’t pay up-front, but seek out the best deal for you when you take the exam, and save having to find the money early. You’ll also be able to choose where to sit the exam – so you can find somewhere local. Big margins are made by many companies that get money upfront for exam fees. For various reasons, many students don’t take their exams but the company keeps the money. Believe it or not, there are training companies who actually rely on students not sitting all the exams – as that’s how they make a lot of their profit. Don’t forget, in the majority of cases of ‘exam guarantees’ – they control when and how often you can do your re-takes. You will have to demonstrate an excellent pass-rate before they’ll approve a re-take.

Paying maybe a thousand pounds extra on an ‘Exam Guarantee’ is foolish – when a commitment to studying and the use of authorised exam preparation tools is actually the key to your success.

Accredited exam preparation packages are crucial – and should definitely be offered by your training provider. Confirm that the exams you practice haven’t just got questions on the right subjects, but additionally ask them in the exact format that the real exams will formulate them. It completely unsettles students if they’re met with completely different formats and phraseologies. ‘Mock’ or practice exams can be very useful as a resource to you – so that when you come to take the proper exam, you will be much more relaxed.

Microsoft's private cloud release all about composite applications

Microsoft's private cloud release all about composite applications
Microsoft's Thursday detailed two key pieces of its strategy for helping developers build applications for the Web and private cloud networks, with a heavy focus on using existing components to build composite applications and services.

Microsoft unveiled the Windows Server AppFabric release candidate, saying final availability will occur in June, while also announcing the first public beta for BizTalk Server 2010, which will be released to manufacturing in the third quarter of 2010.

Microsoft counters Gmail with Hotmail overhaul

Microsoft described its application infrastructure technology during a webcast in which the company stressed the benefits of bringing cloud-like capabilities to existing IT resources behind the firewall. But the approach also seems reminiscent of service-oriented architecture, a buzz-phrase that has fallen out of favor in an IT industry now obsessed with cloud computing.

In addition to building composite applications, one of the major goals of service-oriented architecture, Microsoft said AppFabric and BizTalk Server will allow composite apps to span from the enterprise to public cloud services, such as Windows Azure.

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"What the composite application represents is a model where you will be able to take your existing IT assets, whether it's LOB (line of business) systems, or traditional packaged applications, and seamlessly stitch them together into a model that builds a set of distributed applications that seamlessly span your enterprise, as well as connect up to the broader Internet," said Abhay Parasnis, general manager of Microsoft's application server group.

Building composite applications will help ensure portability of applications, so developers won't be forced to rewrite applications to make them work in new cloud networks, he said.

For Web applications, AppFabric will perform caching, allowing high-speed access to and availability of application data, and will help developers build and manage services for composite apps, Microsoft says. AppFabric will be free to customers who have paid for Windows Server 2008 licenses.

BizTalk Server 2010, meanwhile, works with Windows Server AppFabric to enable developers "to more rapidly build composite applications that connect to disparate line-of-business systems through BizTalk Adapters and BizTalk Transformations from within .NET development environments," according to Microsoft. "This release also delivers simplified trading partner management tools, an enhanced BizTalk mapper that simplifies complex transactions, and a unified dashboard for backup and restore functions."

It's time to virtualize Microsoft Exchange (but not with Hyper-V)

It's time to virtualize Microsoft Exchange (but not with Hyper-V)
Microsoft isn't accustomed to being in second place in any market, but that's the situation it has had to accept as it challenges VMware for supremacy in the x86 virtualization world.

Microsoft has undoubtedly made significant progress in the last couple of years, bolstering its virtualization and management capabilities with Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager. Microsoft thinks it offers enterprises everything they need to virtualize mission-critical workloads, but not everyone agrees.

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Microsoft's 2010 software presents "most complicated lock-in decision in years"

At the Burton Group Catalyst conference this week, analysts told an audience of IT pros that they should be virtualizing Microsoft Exchange - but not with Hyper-V. The recommendation isn't likely to sit well with Microsoft, whose officials have already disputed the Burton Group's claim that Hyper-V is not enterprise-ready. But the analysts are standing firm.

VMware and Citrix are the only two virtualization vendors that meet every one of the Burton Group's criteria for running enterprise workloads. The analyst firm has more than two dozen requirements, and Microsoft has steadily been meeting more and more of them, including the ability to perform live migration of virtual machines across physical servers.

But there is still one feature missing in the area of disaster recovery. Hyper-V does not let IT pros assign priority status specifying which virtual machines get restored first in the wake of a hardware failure.

"The most critical workloads should restart first following a physical server outage, and the Hyper-V R2 platform has no way to prioritize VM restarts," explains Burton Group analyst Bill Pray.

Many customers have decided they can live with this limitation, and expect Microsoft to fix it eventually, and so have gone ahead and virtualized Exchange with Hyper-V anyway. But Burton Group analysts recommend that only VMware and Citrix be used for Exchange and other mission-critical apps.

This is becoming a more important issue, because new features in Exchange 2010, as well as advances in hypervisors and hardware, make virtualization more viable and cost-effective. Exchange 2010 does a better job handling I/O performance, making it possible for customers to virtualize without sacrificing speed, and even letting them make do with cheap storage systems.

"One of the things we did as a big investment in the latest version of Exchange is to move to an environment where you don't need high-end storage for the underlying storage subsystem," says Mike Neil, general manager of Microsoft's server virtualization and Windows Server division.

In the past, Exchange performance on virtual servers "drove some customers crazy," Pray said. The high I/O performance required by email still makes it important to "supersize the server," he notes. But IT should now consider virtualization of Exchange the default option, he said.

"Now the technology is in place," he said. "You should be moving your Exchange server to virtualized environments to get those benefits."

The question of which hypervisor to use remains a source of dispute between Burton Group and Microsoft.

Although Hyper-V doesn't include the exact disaster recovery feature the Burton Group considers necessary, Windows Server 2008 R2's failover clustering has settings that "address some of the scenarios that assignable restart priority addresses," a Microsoft spokesman says.

For example, Microsoft's "VM Auto Start" setting lets customers decide which VMs will automatically restart after failures and which will not. Secondly, a "persistent nodes" feature "will attempt to place a VM back on the node that it last ran on and if not feasible place the VM on other nodes."

Neil said he was surprised the Burton Group recommended against using Hyper-V, and argued that the higher price of VMware's products are not justified by the VMware feature set, especially after the various improvements made to Hyper-V.

Microsoft did not say when it will add the one "missing" feature, but Microsoft customers seem to be confident that the functionality will be added sooner or later.

"That feature has not stopped our clients from deploying the product," said Burton Group analyst Chris Wolf.