Ron Grattopp and I delivered our first installment of four 70-282 exam preps on the web today. The first day is always a bit funky as you try to find your groove.
Added to that was that my Internet went out last night (the ISP -Brighthouse had a misconfigured router) and I spent about an hour on the phone with tech-support before they figured out the issue was not on my end and they didn't know how long it would take to fix. The irony is that I left Germany early to make the web cast from my house in the US to play it safe. (can you imagine your mom telling you to come to dinner in the middle of the webcast?) Make a long story short, I busted into a friends house through the garage and barely made it to dial-in to do the webcast. Success!
One of the things that always takes me back is that folks actually expect a certification exam to be like "real world". HELLO! so let me cover this one again. When you sign up for a vendor exam, all the vendor cares about is that YOU know THEIR PRODUCT. In the case of 70-282 it would be SBS, Windows Server 2003, Microsoft networking and yes NOT third party or real world. Certainly you use hardware RAID and third-party backup and, and, and that is not the point. Microsoft would like to know if you know about all the wonderful things you can accomplish with their software. So if you plan on actually passing the exam, I recommend that you leave the real world hat at the exam room doorstep and put on the vendor hat for about 1.5hrs. Arguing that there are better solutions or that nobody would do it this way is not going to get you to pass.
Exam Tip: Accept that you are in a vendor exam and not in your customers server closet.
Once you get that into your head the exam will be much easier for you. Trust me. I used to complain about the "stupid questions". What happened in reality was that diverting my attention to being negative, I took away precious time and brainpower that I could have used to focus on just answering the question and move on with life. Well, its always easier to point the finger away from ourselves, we couldn't possibly be the source of our problems.
One another note, we do have FREE exam vouchers for everyone that attends the webcast life, and we are giving away two "Microsoft Small Business Specialist Primer: Your Certification Fast Path to Success! books at each session. Good luck at the exam!