I finally got around to taking my 70-292 exam to upgrade my MCSA from 2000 to 2003. Passed first time which is a good thing too, since today is the last day you can officially take the exam. Prometric currently seem to be offering the exam to mid May, but there’s no guarantee that’ll be the case.

The exam itself was far more difficult than any of the previous ones I’ve done, the key areas to know are

• DNS – Probably about 20% of the exam is on DNS, replication, round-robbin etc so know it well;
• POSIX Groups – Know about them, and their limitations;
• VSS – Shadow Copies plays a big part in the exam, know about it and the requirements for using it;
• Backups – For some unbeknown reason Microsoft went over the top with NTBackup stuff, so know about that, ASR, IIS Backups and what’s included in System State;
• SUS – Know about SUS (A separate download, requires IIS) and how to view logs and the approval process;

Good luck in passing!

For those of you who have played with the Windows Server 2008 RTM you may be left wondering why the version is shows as “Build 6001: Service Pack 1”. Hang on, Servcie pack 1? But it hasn’t even shipped yet!

Iain McDonald explains why over on his blog. Vista and Windows 2008 are have an almost identical codebase, so by making windows 2008 service pack 1 on launch they’ll be able to deploy updates for both operating systems . I’d suggest you read his post though, as it’s an interesting read!

First things first, grab the Skype business version from the Skype business site. This has no adverts and is an MSI file for simple deployment.

You’ll probably want my Skype Transform which will remove the desktop shortcut and prevent Skype from auto starting with windows.

You can now deploy Skype in your prefered way (Group Policy, SMS, Microsoft Deployment etc). If you’re using Microsoft Deployment, you can use the following command:

msiexec /i SkypeSetup.msi /quiet TRANSFORMS="NoDesktopShortcutNoAutorun.mst"