MCITP & Me?

August 5, 2009 7:37 AM

Within the next year I want to get as many MCITP certifications as possible. What are the best personal-time resources for me? And what should I know going forward? Any advice?

My level of experience:
I'm a helpdesk guy with two years experience at the consumer level and one year at the corporate/enterprise level. I know non-Server Windows very well, barring only the most arcane permissions issues and registry chicanery.

I know enough about Windows Server 2008 to be productive, I have built virtual machines and deployed simple applications on them to a production environment via Hyper-V (with supervision, but it was strictly hands-off just to make sure there would be no surprises when things went live.) I can handle remote printing issues, etc., but flounder at the more advanced networking issues.

I want to be certified first as an Enterprise Support Technician, then a Server Administrator, and then finishing as an Enterprise Administrator. My employer will be sponsoring some kind of training for me but I want to start getting a feel for the material.

What are the best inexpensive resources I can browse in my own time? Any good forums to browse? I've heard good things about Technet but I need to save up a bit before I can drop the money for that.

Also, how should I request to be trained from my employer? Books? DVDs? Local training courses? I absolutely love books but I hate single-sentence + picture walkthroughs with little to no textual explanation, which is what most server books seem to be. I don't mind DVDs or courses, assuming they actually teach me what I need to get certified.

posted by Phyltre to Technology (3 answers total)

Easy question first - you should ask to be trained how you learn best. Sounds like you prefer classroom training so go that route. For budget reasons you can also look into instructor led online classes. I never enjoyed those as much, but YMMV.

Your employer should buy technet right away, like this afternoon. For $350 you get two MS support incidents and a ton of software access. Well worth it, but a lot of the actual content is free on their websites if you poke around.

You should get a copy of the sysinternals toolkit (free from MS) and get to know their utilities. That will help tremendously with understanding those 'arcane' registry and permission issues. Mark's blog is also awesome - the howto's on using a debugger to find and fix client issues are awesome and if you grab his book it will take your understanding of windows to a new level.

The MS forums were total crap, but now seem much less crappy so thumbs up. Many of the product teams have blogs or dedicated sites - the exchange team is in my favorites, but the scripting and IIS sites have been pretty solid as well. http://blogs.technet.com is a good jumping off point.
posted by anti social order at 10:36 AM on August 5, 2009

Response by poster: Alright, I'm now a Technet subscriber and I've just started reading Mark's blog. I'll start getting in touch with the sysinternals toolkit once I buy the book.

Thanks for the recommendations, the comments to Mark's blog posts are really what I was looking for--people of various backgrounds bouncing off of solid pointers. That kind of discussion is really what helps me learn without losing focus. Also makes great reading during little bits of downtime.
posted by Phyltre at 12:36 PM on August 5, 2009

whatever you do, learn powershell. all new windows server platform are going to be heavy in powershell.
posted by fumbducker at 12:37 PM on August 5, 2009