Good value providers - MCSE 2012 path

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Hi Guys

I have a MCSE 2003 which I gained from self study, this time i'm thinking of doing some proper courses so theres no gaps in my knowledge, unfortunately the company I work for will not pay for it so i'll have to finance it myself, can anyone recommend any companies which will not break the bank however also has decent training.

I've asked for a quote from QA but I reckon its going to be out of my budget..

Advice would be much appreciated

Thanks

 

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Give these guys a try, one of the better ones out there MS Training

 

Thanks for the replies so far, I'll get prices.

At the moment they all seem to be £1k a module and there's 5 exams which is too much, might have stick with train signal or similar if cant get cheaper!

 

Got quoted £6k from QA! way out of budget.

Firebrand quote "You'll be MCSE Server certified in just 6 days." which just sounds too quick to learn everything properly so i'll probably give that a miss too, I liked the idea of free training if you failed though.

 

will the company your working for at present give you a payrise for having the cert? if so then some of the costs might be worth it as the payrise may cover part of that year on year

 

Not at the moment unfortunately, however I wanted to do it for myself so if an opportunity does arrive in the future i'm ready to take it and also I really want the knowledge too, not just the cert, I know there are braindumps which I can use to pass but definitely don't want to do that.

 

I have to ask, what's your current Windows 2008 experience like? I ask because the requirements for the MCITP:EA\SA used to be that you had to have had 12 - 18 months experience with the technology.

I have used Firebrand a couple of times in the past and for someone with the right experience it's a good choice (ie you need to be up to scratch with the technology and need to do it in a fast time period for one reason or another).

Unfortunately if you're new to the later technologies then a bootcamp isn't the answer because it's a lot of information to take on board and the chances of remembering it are slim.

My advice would be to wait and see what the offerings from Trainsignal and CBTNuggets are going to be like, get a home lab up and running and just play with the technology to get some experience with it. It may also be worthwhile actually doing the 2008 certifications now instead, that gives you the experience of the most current and widely used Windows Server OS and also gives you a stepping stone up for the 2012 certifications by allowing you to do the following exams 70-413, 70-414 and 70-417.

 

we primarily support SBS so i've supported SBS 2011 quite a bit (basically server 2008 DC + exchange 2010), i've also probably done about 10 migrations from SBS 2003 to SBS 2011 all smoothly, I feel like I know the main stuff but there are gaps too, i've also seen some trainsignal videos on 2008 however because I dont use a lot of the features day to day (e.g. RODC's, trusts etc) i always get rusty on them, SBS environment people mainly just use DC, fileserver and exchange.

I've setup lots of servers from scratch, installed exchange from scratch too on VMware just to get the experience etc and found it straight forward, I feel fairly confident in going for a boot camp and think I can handle it.

A bit offtopic but for anyone who does VM labs, Hyper-V built in on windows 8 is really good, you get the true speeds of SSD on the VM!

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Maybe I should just self study for now, chances are because I dont do some of the big stuff day to day by the time I get another job i'll forget it anyway, alternatively need to try and find a way of keeping up to speed with it.

 

corp_jones, i am nearly at the stage of doing some server 2008 exams myself in the next couple of months anyway... if you have skype and wanted to work together towards each of them?