Month: January 2012

Pittsburgh SharePoint User’s Group

I will be speaking at the Pittsburgh SharePoint User’s Group on Wednesday, January 18th. The meeting will start at 11:00 am and my topic will be "Users, Profiles, and MySites: Managing a Changing SharePoint User population”. Here’s a brief description of the talk:

Users, Profiles, and MySites: Managing a Changing SharePoint User population

Every organization has some level of personnel change and turnover.  The question is, in the midst of this fluid user population how can you manage a user’s access to SharePoint and retrieve important information stored in their personal site efficiently?  Updating existing user information is also often a problem and most people have questions about how security permissions work in SharePoint. In this talk we will examine how SharePoint stores information about users and the underlying processes controlling user accounts, permissions, profiles and personal MySites. We’ll look at what works, what doesn’t work, and possible workarounds.  Along the way we’ll discuss the Best Practices for managing users, their profiles, and MySites in a SharePoint environment. We’ll discuss how this works in both 2007 and 2010.

The group will meet at the Pittsburgh Technology Council.  You can get a map by clicking on the link below.

Pittsburgh Technology Council
2000 Technology Drive
Pittsburgh, PA 15219

Office 365 Certification Exams Being Developed

Office 365Microsoft is currently working on two new certification exams for IT professionals who work with Microsoft Office 365 online systems.  The exams are due to be released in April, 2012.  If you work with Office 365 you should be working on the knowledge needed to pass these exams starting NOW!  You can read more about what skills each exam is designed to test using the links below:

Exam 70-323: Administering Office 365 intended for IT professionals who administer Microsoft Office 365 in an environment that may include Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Lync, and/or Microsoft SharePoint

Exam 70-321: Deploying Office 365 intended for consultants and IT professionals who plan and implement Office 365. This includes migrations to Office 365 (simple and hybrid deployments)

Passing these exams will give you the following  certifications:

  1. Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS): Administering Office 365 (pass Exam 70-323)
  2. Microsoft Certified IT Professional (MCITP): Office 365 Administrator (pass Exam 70-323 and Exam 70-321)

 

The links above provide an outline of what skills are being tested but at this point there is no official training material available for the exams.  Your best way to prepare is to work with the Product.