..don't talk about Advanced Infrastructure. Or so at least it was until now. What am I talking about? I'm talking about our Microsoft Certified Master: Advanced Infrastructure certification. Never heard of it? Well, you're not alone. This was a Master...

Just getting the labs checked over for the Exchange session which starts Monday and I recently got some new toys... I think 48 GB of ram, 16 cores and 2TB of disk per candidate server should be enough for a lab or two... don't you? I've got 16 vm...

We're in the third and final week of SQL now, OCS starts on Monday (Adrian flying in this weekend so fingers crossed no delays...) and a week from Monday, Exchange, SharePoint and Directory all start. It's a busy month ahead. If you are coming to one...

I sent the below to all of our MCM/MCA communities last night, and thought I'd share it here, too. These programs rock! ...and I'll miss them dearly. Hi All, As the subject line says: it’s time for a change. I’m writing to let you know that...

The seventh SQL Microsoft Certified Masters rotation is almost finished. It has been a jam packed 24 hours: A full day on the topic of SQL Security from Greg Low Last night we had a Meet and Greet in Building 35 - where our candidates had a chance...

Hi All, I'm happy to share a little retrospective from another one of our Directory MCM's, Rob Silver, who wrote us the following just the other day. It's a great example of long term ROI / benefits from investing in the program that I hope more and more people are seeing out there. ...

Hi All, Please join me in welcoming Brett Geoffroy to ‘The Master Team’! Brett will be driving our SharePoint MCM and MCA programs for us full time in FY10. He has been pulling double duty for a few months already while working with James to get...

Ade Famoti , an Architect for Microsoft in Africa recently added MCA 2007 to his MCA in Exchange 2003! One of only 7 people worldwide to hold both those certs. There are some more MCA upgrades in the pipeline, but for now, Ade is lucky number 7! Trivia...

Over the last few weeks we've added a few more people to our growing community, so I delighted to be able to publically congratulate: Dwight Jesseman - Dwight is a Senior Systems Engineer for Unified Communications at the University of Florida and...

We kicked off the seventh rotation of the SQL Server Microsoft Certified Master program on Monday and I have to say how impressed I am with this latest batch of 12 candidates. The cumulative experience in the room is significant, and the intelligence...

I'm pleased to announce that we have three new members of the OCS MCM community after they completed retakes. There are, in no particular order, Robert Burnett - Robert works for CXO Global Solutions in the US Jim Raymond - Jim works for Dyntek...

We have just started publishing a list of people who have earned an MCM and/or MCA certification over at our Microsoft Learning site. Go take a look here . We'll be adding names as MCM's and MCA's ask us to, it's entirely optional, and we hope this...

I was recently asked by a potential SQL MCM candidate if we could share testimonials about the SQL Microsoft Certified Master program from non-Microsoft employees Out of the 57 MCMs in the world, only 12 are not Microsoft employees (by the way – the numbers...

We’re midway through the second week of “Rotation 7” for the SQL Server Microsoft Certified Master program. We tried something new for this rotation, providing a copy of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Internals for each participant. So far we’ve been able...