[f3z81]

Originally Posted by roolee

Ummmm, yeah, so I'm still none the wiser on which is the best study guide for Exchange Server 2003. Might just go with the MS Press one.

I just sat the exam for the 284 yesterday and failed (622); I don't feel too bad as I have a free second shot.

I used the Sybex and the Microsoft official course book 2400c (As well as doing the 284 class based training).

I would say that it is the hardest Microsoft exam I have done yet, due to the amount of knowledge it requires from other areas, I am glad that I have not long sat the 70-290/291 as it helped with the active directory and DNS questions.

My advice would be don’t focus one particular book for this exam as I found the Microsoft course and the Sybex book just didn’t give enough detail for the exam. Then again I did not have any prior experience of exchange administration prior to sitting the class based course.

I will hopefully pass next time round, I bought some test questions form transcender which will hopefully help, I previously only used the free Sybex questions that came with the book, which were much more basic by comparison. (Strange for Sybex, as I found their questions/exams in their other books harder than the questions in the other exams).

I would also recommend setting up a Lab with test machines. I used Virtual PC 2007 with a number of servers and clients, and would practice setting up routing groups, connectors ect. I was also lucky enough to have done the class based labs of upgrading exchange 5.5 to 2003, as that’s something I could not replicate in my own lab, due to not being able to obtain a copy of exchange 5.5 or win server 2000 (without going down the dodgy route) despite having my MSDN Subscription (Thanks Dell).