New certification vouchers available

Microsoft Learning har released new certification vouchers to encourage us to get cracking with our certification path.

There are five Career Certification Exam pack options for you to choose from, each serves different certification needs and with different discounts:

• The 2 Exam Pack (Get 15% off + a Second Shot on Every Exam)
• The 3 Exam Pack (Get 15% off + a Second Shot on Every Exam)
• The 4 Exam Pack (Get 20% off + a Second Shot on Every Exam)
• The 5 Exam Pack (Get 20% off + a Second Shot on Every Exam)
• Single Exam with Second Shot for an additional 15% (for total $143.75 USD in the United States)

The Exam Packs are not restricted to just a certification path. Customers can use them how they see fit.

Drop me an email if you want one or more vouchers – remember to state which option you want and which country it should be used in.

SharePoint 2010 certifications passed

Happy days – I passed both the SharePoint 2010 beta exams I attempted 🙂

SharePoint 2010 exams available July 12

Microsoft Learning has announced that the new SharePoint 2010 exams will be available in July. The exams are:

• 70-573:TS: Microsoft SharePoint 2010, Application Development
• 70-576: PRO: Designing and Developing Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Applications
• 70-667: TS: Microsoft SharePoint 2010, Configuring
• 70-668: PRO: Microsoft SharePoint 2010, Administrator

I was so fortunate to be part of the 70-667 and 70-668 beta exams and although I cannot reveal any details, I really liked what I saw. The exams are much more targeted towards real job scenarios and are not trying to cover too much ground, which I think is a major problem with the MOSS 2007 and WSS 3.0 exams.

Remember, I can provide 2nd shot vouchers for free. Drop me a mail or leave a comment if you want one 🙂

Certification vouchers

I was offered a spot in the Microsoft Learning Rewards program which means that I can now request certification vouchers for everyone

You can now request Second Shot vouchers for your students. Using Second Shot vouchers, each with a unique code number, your students can get a free retake when they fail the first attempt at a Microsoft Certification exam.  This will help reduce their concern and fear of not passing the exam.www.prometric.com/microsoft

The Second Shot vouchers through Learning Rewards program apply to all Microsoft IT Professional and developer certification exams and all Microsoft Dynamics exams (all 070 exams).  Academic exams (072 and 073 exams) are not available through Learning Rewards.

Students may redeem the vouchers at a Prometric Testing Center in person, by telephone, or online at

Each voucher is valid for one exam retake (if the first attempt failed) and one Practice Test discounted 40% before June 30, 2010.

My personal benefit is that I collect points that can be used for free certification exams, but the point required are so many that it is unlikely to ever pay out.

Anyway – drop me a mail if you’d like a voucher.

SharePoint 2010 RTM and Office 2010 RTM now available on MSDN and TechNet

… in case you missed it 😉

SharePoint 2010 reaches RTM!

The product group has announced that SharePoint 2010 has reached RTM. Exiting times indeed! It is not available on TechNet yet, though.

I have been working with SharePoint 2010 since CTP and even though the product appears more and more stable from CPT to Beta to RC some functionality is still not as integrated as hoped (Managed Metadata and standard Search being some of the areas) I look very much forward to see what has changed in the RTM bits 🙂

SharePoint eMagazine launched

Grab your copy here: http://www.sdn.nl/IW/FreeMagazine/tabid/139/Default.aspx

The first edition is all about SharePoint 2010 and contains the following articles:

• SharePoint 2010 Enterprise – Sjoerd van Lochem
• Customizing the SharePoint Ribbon – Marianne van Wanrooij
• Visual Studio Extensions – Niels Loup
• Working with data in SharePoint Designer 2010- Laura Rogers
• Sandboxed Solutions – Mirjam van Olst
• New ECM features in SharePoint 2010 – Robert van Son
• Creating new visual experiences with Visio Services – Toni Frankola
• A SharePoint User eXperience – Sandra de Ridder
• Introduction to the Business Connectivity Services – Nick Swan
• SharePoint 2010 Client Object Models – Ton Stegeman
• Understanding Identity in SharePoint 2010 – Michiel van Otegem
• Happy Together in 2010! – Dux Raymond
• SharePoint 2010 Chart Web Part – Agnes Molnar
• Enrich your SharePoint 2010 portal by integrating SAP applications –     Cyrille Visser , Johan Kroese and Huub Montanus
• SharePointComic – Dan Lewis

It looks very promising and it should be interesting to follow the magazines to come!

SharePoint Saturday EMEA- online

In case you have missed it – or forgotten all about it, as I had – note there is an online SharePoint Saturday event coming up January 23! Register here.

Cannot publish pages in SharePoint 2010

If you have created your SharePoint 2010 farm manually without running the farm Configuration Wizard, you might encounter this error when you try to publish a page or stating a workflow:

“The form cannot be rendered. This may be due to a misconfiguration of the Microsoft SharePoint Server State Service. For more information, contact your server administrator.”

The problem is stat the State service is not configured since the Farm Configuration Wizard has not been run. Configure it with PowerShell using these instructions from Technet:

1. On the Taskbar, click Start, point to Administrative Tools, and then click Windows PowerShell Modules.
2. In Windows PowerShell, create a service application by typing $serviceApp = New-SPStateServiceApplication -Name “State Service”
3. Create a State Service database and associate it with a service application, by typing New-SPStateServiceDatabase -Name “StateServiceDatabase” -ServiceApplication $serviceApp.
4. Create a State Service Application Proxy and associate it with the service application by typing New-SPStateServiceApplicationProxy -Name “State Service” -ServiceApplication $serviceApp -DefaultProxyGroup.

Once these instructions are run, you have a shiny new State Service Service Application and you should be able to publish pages again. Remember to verify that your web Application is associated with the State Service Service Application.

 

Forefront Threat Management Gateway 2010 RTM’s

The Forefront TMG team has announced they have submitted the final bits to RTM. Well done!

More information here: http://blogs.technet.com/isablog/archive/2009/11/17/forefront-threat-management-gateway-2010-release.aspx