Time for some Exchange Training?

The autumn is almost here, and there are many of us waiting for the Exchange 2000 release. Being a MCT (Microsoft Certified Trainer) for MS Exchange since its first release I know that the time just before a product release is a time of hard work for all the people at the Microsoft courseware department. You can easily imagine how it must be; as soon as the public beta version is released everyone starts to scream for training materials. The course department must work day and night to fix something built upon the beta release and when they are finished with that the development team releases the RC1! Remember that a beta version of a Microsoft program, for example MS Exchange-2000 Beta 3, is full of all sorts of interesting features – In the RC1 (Release Candidate 1) the development team will take away all features that a) the marketing group don’t like, or b) that is not working properly. So the RC version will not have as much features as the Beta! And that means that the courseware is talking about features that don’t exist in the next release, and people start to scream again that it must be updated! It must be hard to be a courseware writer!

A good example of this chaos is the first E2K course: Microsoft released the first E2K course during the spring; number 1569A “Updating Administration and Support Skill from MS Exchange 5.x to MS Exchange-2000”. It was built upon E2K Beta 3. The E2K Beta 3 version did have several bugs, the Win2K had bugs and the course 1569A labs had bugs. In short, that course was a bit messy. Almost at the same time as the release of 1569A Microsoft released E2K RC1. The course 1569A was now not fully accurate. During the summer MS did a upgrade of the courseware, called 1569B. It was actually the same text book as the 1569A, but the labs and the preparations was adjusted for E2K RC1. So the trainer can select to give a 1569 course based on Beta 3 or RC1. Shortly after, Microsoft releases RC2 of E2K. This version is very similar to the RC1, but there are some changes, both under the hood and in the GUI. So if you use the 1569B material with a RC2 version you must be aware of the differences. It is small, but it is there. 

So what is the current status for someone that wants to learn E2K today? Well, you should start with the course 1569B, and if possible run the labs on RC2.  Note that there are some national adopted versions of the 1569A course in German (2058A) and French (2057A), but I don’t know of any 1569B except in English. This is a 4-day course. Included in the student cd:s for 1569B are a self-paced course called 1571A “Designing and Deploying MS Exchange 2000 RC1”. If you are lucky, your trainer will add this as an extra day to 1569B, making it a 5-day course in total. If not, you can study 1571A your self. These two courses will give you a good start on your E2K road.

During the autumn Microsoft will release course 1570 “Deploying MS Exchange 2000 Server in a Small Organization” and 1572 “Implementing and Administering MS Exchange 2000”.  I think that most people will be interested in the 1572 course. It will be a 5 day instructor lead course focusing on the skills necessary to install, configure and administer E2K. It will also help you to prepare for the MCP exam 70‑244: “Installing, Configuring and Administering MS Exchange 2000 Server”. Early next year we will see course 1573: “Designing and Deploying a MS Exchange Organization” and that will finally make the 1569B + 1571A course obsolete. Expect to see a separate MCP exam for that.

Of course you can always try the RC2 yourself! But please remember that you need to upgrade your Win2K environment before installing RC2; otherwise you will have some problems. You can read more about that in the Q262259 article.  Good Luck with you training!

/Goran Husman
MCSE, MCT
CEO Xtreme Data