edmondegan, MCTS, SBSC

I recently went on a Microsoft subsidised course held in London at QA Training. It was a 4 day course which covered everything from Installing a fresh Small Business Server 2008 installation right through to migration from an existing Small Business Server 2003 installation with minimal downtime.

The sessions were lead by Mark Cresswell who is an long time Microsoft Small Business Specialist (2003 & 2008) with experience dating way back to BackOffice Small Business Server 4.0 amongst other things he also teaches a variety of courses including Sharepoint.

It was a great opportunity to get some additional knowledge from someone in the know, I had already completed the MSPress 70-653 Self Paced training Kit.

I had taken the MS practice test once before heading down to the course and failed, not too bad for a first attempt and considering I got a fair few questions on areas I hadn’t covered much before.

Mark delivered the course really well considering the images which Microsoft had supplied were suspect to say the least, as it was a 5 day course which was to be compacted into 4 days there was going to be some fat which had to be trimmed and this came in the form of some of the lab exercises but as the majority of the attendees had a good understanding of areas such as adding servers to an existing domain we were able to skip doing a lot ourselves and watched Mark run through some of the more time consuming but interesting labs.

Some of the things I found extremely interesting

• Ability to perform an Bare Metal Restore to dissimilar hardware using Windows Server backup (equivalent from Acronis would cost £400+ ex VAT  for Acronis SBS backup and Recovery)
• How easy the SBS2003 – SBS2008 migration process was, never tried the swing migration but after seeing the Microsoft method, I don’t see the need to.
• Walkthrough of  using a single certificate to configure outlook anywhere (providing your public DNS provider supports SRV records)
• Microsoft SPF Wizard (http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/safety/content/technologies/senderid/wizard/)
• Microsoft Memory Diagnostic Tool (http://oca.microsoft.com/en/windiag.asp) – create an bootable ISO to test memory, supposed to be more advanced than standard MS Memory test

I took the practice test (results above) on thursday night after getting back from London and did considerably better and took it again on Friday and got the same result, I’m currently trying to fit in booking a seat at a Prometric testing center and taking the actual 70-653 Microsoft exam but the only date in Sheffield is on the 14th which is when I am installing Maximizer CRM at one of our clients sites and add to that my cars been written off (looking for a replacement at the moment) it’s proving difficulty to say the least !.

In closing I think for £200.00 +VAT (the course was subsidised by Microsoft for people in the Microsoft Partner Program) it was well worth the time and money plus we got biscuits, sandwiches and free coffee for the 4 days so you can’t complain at not getting good value for money.

I met some nice people down there and had a chance to promote some of our products like PecoBOO and our new Broadleaf but it was nice to chat about how everyone else handles delivering services and hear some other peoples horror stories and even managed to sneak a quick Guinness in to boot.

Special hello’s go out to Mark Cresswell, George, Reuben Cook (blog) and Paul from Advoco Solutions who provided laughter and some interesting conversations while I was in the city.

¬¬  Edmond Egan is Technical Services Manager for BothRealities, a managed services company based in Sheffield,UK. He is also a Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist and part of the Small Business Specialist Community with a passion for Server and Desktop Virtualization and Disaster Recovery.