Lukas Beeler’s IT Blog

About a month ago, i’ve passed exam 70-237. A few days ago, the last exam of the the MCITP: Microsoft Exchange 2007 Messaging Solutions Administrator series (not yet on the MS websites) was released - that is exam 70-238.

I noticed this on Saturday, and booked a testing appointment for today. I arrived almost late at the testing center, because a customer appointment took longer than i thought (that’ll teach me to book exams in the afternoon). Another bonus was that it is quite hot today (32C according to my car), and the A/C in the testing center has failed or was overloaded - in fact, it was almost cooler outside the building. I was offered to move my testing appointment, but i didn’t want to.

70-237 was easy as pie, and mostly theoretical questions on “how should you do this”. 70-236 required you to learn vast PowerShell commands to be able to pick the right one from the answers given.

70-238 was completely different, and much more technical than 70-237. A very large focus were backup, backup windows, recovery methodologies, migrations from older Exchange versions, migrations from/to clustered mailbox servers, and lots of questions about journalling, mailbox and transport rules, and Send and Receive connectors. Most of the questions focused on where you have to set rules, i.E. Hub or Edge server. This is usually pretty easy, but there were a few cases where the solution wasn’t obvious.

A bit of material was the same as in 70-237 (not word for word, but in the type of questions) - focusing on which rules you need for what. A few other questions centered around Active Directory, and the requirements Exchange has for it.

There were also questions which i found completely irrelevant - at least 3 questions focused on MOM and what you should do to configure it with Exchange. I never used MOM, so i used all my guessing skills.

In the end a passed with around 850 points, i expected much worse than that. I didn’t even have bars that we’re below the (imaginary) 80% margin, even though i don’t think i understood all the Journalling/Transport/Managed folder stuff completely.

So now i should be a MCITP: Microsoft Exchange 2007 Messaging Solutions Administrator, as long as Microsoft doesn’t have the same troubles they had with the MCSA and 70-620.

Update: Updating the transcript wasn’t a problem this time, the credentials were visible a day after i passed this exam.