As the new year approaches, I figured it was time to get some Exchange certification under my belt. I picked up the MS Press 70-662 book a week ago and have been burning through the chapters so far. It doesn’t seem to be the most popular certification out there, but I’ve always found the certification tracks to be a great way to utilize a structured learning plan.

I bumped my home PC up to 24GBs of RAM to handle the 6 or 8 VMs I’m going to use for labbing. It’s fun to make the environment more complex than what Microsoft recommends, it ends up giving me a chance to troubleshoot issues I wouldn’t encounter if I followed the MS labs.

Having done a Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010 migration just a few months back, I’m having a pretty easy go so far. I’ve also written a fairly complex PowerShell script to generate weekly and monthly report statistics, so I’m very comfortable with the heavy PowerShell focus. PowerShell is a whole other subject, but let me briefly say thank you to Microsoft for finally getting a decent CLI in place. I can’t wait to pickup the second edition of Learn Windows PowerShell In A Month Of Lunches which covers version 3.0.

I’ll be publishing a few Exchange scripts I’ve written over the past few months in a post later this week. I’m working to improve them, but I’m pretty happy with the results for the length of time I’ve been using PowerShell for.

Off to read another chapter before The Walking Dead!