Rob’s Ragg…. Tech Talk & Cool Toys for Grown up Boys

Now that you've seen Response Point, what do you think?

http://www.microsoft.com/responsepoint/

Response Point was Bill Gates' last pet project before he retired.  The big differentiater between Response Point and other VOIP solutions for small businesses is the voice control offered by Response Point.  Users can "talk" to the phone instead of dialing numbers, you can copy your Outlook contacts to your phone, and you can control the behavior of incoming calls.  Response Point can also let you define how your voice mail gets delivered to you.  You can have your voice mail stored in the Response Point system like a traditional phone, or you can have it email the voice message directly to your Inbox, so you can listen to the voice mail anywhere you can access your email. 

SP1 added SIP trunking to Response Point, and NGT is one of our partners that offer this functionality.

SIP trunking allows VOIP not only within your network, but over the Internet as well.  NGT provides quality of service management so that even though your voice calls are traveling over the Internet, NGT's device will ensure that your voice quality remains consistent.  NGT also allows you to add additional features to your overall VOIP solution than Response Point alone can offer by itself.  Check out NGT at their URL below.

http://www.ngt.com/responsepoint/

During each of our events this semester, we're also handing out information cards on the NGT offerings.  If you fill out the cards and return them after the event, your cards will be added to a drawing for a $75.00 gas card.  NGT will also be happy to follow up with you to answer any of your questions.

If you have any Response Point questions, give me a yell.

Until next time!

Rob

We released Windows HPC Server 2008 to Manufacturing

http://www.microsoft.com/hpc/en/us/default.aspx

I talked about our collaboration with CRAY on our HPC platform, and now that we've released our High Performance Computing (HPC) platform to manufacturing, you'll get to see the power we've come together to provide.  HPC is not a solution just for the large enterprise customers; HPC can be used by anyone that wants do some major crunching in a short period of time.  There are a lot of scenarios where HPC can really make a difference, but one of my favorite scenarios is the spreadsheet.  If you have spreadsheets, or applications, that take a long time to "compute";  HPC may be able to reduce that time.  Most scenarios where computational time is slowing the speed of business, HPC may help you reduce the computational time to something more in line with the needs of the business.  If you're making business decisions based on results from a long computational task, what's the value of getting your results sooner?  If you could have your results this afternoon as opposed to tomorrow morning, would that elevate our customers' business?

There are a ton of scenarios for HPC, so anytime you think you're waiting on results longer than the business can wait, or if faster results can make the business more efficient, let's have a discussion about HPC to see if it can help accelerate your business.

Until next time!

Rob

Application Compatibility and User Account Control

I demonstrate a portion of this kit during our presentation and I wanted to make sure you knew where to get these tools.  These are some great tools, remember?  This tool will let you resolve some of the application compatibility issues some of the legacy applications might have with Windows Vista.  This tool will let you create "shims" that smooth some of the conflicts legacy applications may have.  Here is where you can get the whole toolkit:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/aa905066.aspx

We have a webcast available that can give you more in-depth information about this toolkit.  Check it out.

TechNet Webcast: Making Windows Vista Application Compatibility Testing More Predictable (Level 300)

Event ID: 1032374416

http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032374416&EventCategory=4&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US

I hope this helps, it should let you move beyond some of the most annoying Windows Vista deployment blockers.  Let's make sure we dig into tools like this so that our customers can realize the value of Windows Vista.

Until next time!

Rob

Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit Solution Accelerator

We talked about this during our session, but I wanted to point this out.  This one is very good at helping you understand what hardware can be upgraded to Windows Vista without any upgrades, what hardware can be upgraded after minor upgrades (like additional memory), or the hardware you have cannot run Windows Vista and should be replaced.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb977556.aspx

This is an agent-less inventory tool that can give you a "business owner ready" report to help your customers understand where their hardware stands and the additional value Windows Vista can provide to their business.  While this is a super inventory tool, it does not replace System Center Configuration Manager, or System Center Essentials for your normal hardware inventories and system management.

Check out the assessments and let me know what you think.

Until next time!

Rob

Putting our Money where our Mouth is

I've talked about this, here are the details:

Introducing Windows Vista Small Business Assurance

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/assurance/default.aspx

When you buy a new PC with Windows Vista Business or Windows Vista Ultimate from July 1 through December 31, 2008, you'll receive free support, compatibility assistance, and one-on-one coaching from Microsoft to help ensure a smooth transition.

Again, we are putting our money where our mouth is.  We all know we need to migrate our customers to Windows Vista, now we have a way to deal with any glitches we encounter.  Check out this offer and ask for help if you need it.

I hope this helps, please let me know if you have any questions.

Until next time,

Rob

Business Productivity Online Suite – Workshop for Deploying and Administering Services

We talked about BPOS during our sessions and I want to make sure you are aware of this new offering and the available discount before October 20th. 

Register by October 20, 2008 and receive 50% off of the course fee!  Use Promo Code BPOS50 when registering to take advantage of this 50% discount offer! OVERVIEW:Microsoft is launching Business Productivity Online Suite to provide enterprise-class software to customers via subscription services that will be hosted by Microsoft and sold with partners. Business Productivity Online Suite consists of Microsoft Exchange Online, Microsoft Office SharePoint Online, Microsoft Office Live Me

View Full Description

Hands-on Lab Workshops
Partners that register before Oct 8, 2008 will enjoy 50% off the registration fee (I just wanted to repeat it). Click here to register or learn more. 

Hand-on Lab Workshop Event date/City schedule

Oct 21, 2008  Greenwood Village (Denver)       

Oct 21, 2008  Edina (Minneapolis)    

Oct 23, 2008  San Diego       

Oct 23, 2008  Washington     

Oct 28, 2008  Irvine      

Oct 30, 2008  Houston      

Oct 30, 2008  Waltham (Boston) 

Nov 04, 2008  San Francisco    

Nov 05, 2008  Oakbrook (Chicago)      

Nov 06, 2008  Exton (Philadelphia)       

Nov 06, 2008  Atlanta       

Nov 12, 2008  Bellevue (Seattle)       

Nov 13, 2008  Tampa       

Nov 13, 2008  Dallas     

Nov 14, 2008  Mason (Cincinnati)    

Nov 18, 2008  New York (Manhattan)       

Nov 18, 2008  San Jose      

Nov 19, 2008  Carmel (Indianapolis)      

Nov 20, 2008  Phoenix       

Until next time,

Rob

That was Embarrassing!

I'm not good at laughing at myself but I'm trying to get better, so help me laugh a bit and let's both learn from it.  I have a virtual machine that I use to demo our Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT) during my presentation and I've run through my demo a number of times.  Usually I just reset my VM before my next test or demonstration, but unfortunately today, I didn't reset my VM after I walked through my demo.  When I went to demonstrate the misbehaving application today, it didn't misbehave!  It worked flawlessly and it was embarrassing.  Just so you don't make my mistake, all of the app compat shims installed on a workstations can be uninstalled via the Programs and Functions applet in Control Panel.  Each set of shims will show up as an application so you can uninstall the shims just like any other application.

There were a number of questions asking where these solutions accelerators could be found.  Here's the URL:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/solutionaccelerators/default.aspx

The Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT) contains the Standard User Analyzer tool that allows you to create the shims.  Check it out, here's the URL to the Vista Deployment enhancements and it also discusses ACT.  This is a very good read and will give you an overview of the improvements we made that make deploying Windows Vista a whole lot easier than it was to deploy Windows XP.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc507856.aspx

If your looking for the content of our current presentations, check out our new URL:

http://www.microsoftts2.com/

I just saw this blog, my manager, Mike Marshall posted this and I think it's useful after some of the discussions I had today:

Partners! Get the Windows Vista Facts!  This is the top 10 list of Vista facts:

http://ts2blogs.com/blogs/mmars/archive/2008/09/18/partners-get-the-windows-vista-facts.aspx

I'm a PC for the small business...

Until next time!

Rob

SBS 2003 Premium with SA

If you have SBS 2003 Premium with SA, what is the upgrade path to SBS 2008?  The real issue is that SBS 2008 does not include ISA server, but if you have SA on SBS 2003 Premium, we will provide an additional copy of Server 2003 and ISA with an upgrade to TMG when it ships.  Please check out the like below to get the facts straight, this site is the official answer, not me :)...

Check out the following link:

http://www.microsoft.com/sbs/en/us/licensing-faq.aspx

The fourth question from the bottom addresses this scenario.

Here is the exact text:

Essential Business Server Disc2, Setting up the Management Server and TMG

OK,

So after you finished the Preparation wizards, the next step is starting the installation of the Management Server.  The System Requirements state that the Management Server and the Messaging Server require a minimum of 4 GB of RAM.  With SBS 2008, the setup process will halt if you have less than 4 GB of memory in your machine.  The EBS installation did not fail when I gave it less than 4 GB of RAM, but of course, performance was "less than optimal".  I gave it 2 GB of RAM and it installed without complaint.

When I went to setup the TMG server, the Management Server kept a wizard on its screen that provided a checklist of progress...  The messaging server would not install until the TMG server installation was complete.  This is cool, the messaging server depends on the security server for inbound mail and hygiene. 

Of course if you do get ahead of yourself, you have the opportunity to Retry the installation without having to start the installation process from the beginning again.

The wizards also download the latest updates for all of the servers.  I like this, but of course my goal is to get the servers setup asap so having to wait on updates is not what I want to do, but we know we need to do it, so just hang in there and let it happen. 

Now that the TMG server is setup, we'll talk about the messaging server next...

I'm a PC for the small business!

Until next time!

Rob

Now that Windows Essential Business Server is here, where do we start?

I've already told you that I really like our Step-by-Step guides, so it should be no surprise that we have one for EBS, and of course I like it!

I tried to pop in the DVD and just try to install EBS, but no luck.  You need to plan this installation, and we've provided a Preparation and Planning Wizard to assist with the process. 

Preparation and Planning

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc768590.aspx

You have to run the Preparation and Planning wizards, yes there are two, before you can install EBS 2008.  These wizards generate an output file that you must provide during the installation process.  These wizards are on the first disc of the EBS media.

Check out:

Deploying Windows Essential Business Server Step-by-Step

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc768591.aspx

This is funny, when I ran the preparation wizard, it had to scan my network for available services  Since I have an existing forest, it asked if I wanted to join EBS to my existing forest.  Right now I want to create a separate network for EBS.

This is where I hit a snag...  EBS is fine with installing into an existing network, and it's even OK if you want to keep your existing firewall / gateway in place, but you need to be a bit deceptive to prevent having to make changes to your existing infrastructure.  If you want to keep your existing firewall / gateway, EBS wants to take it's internal IP (your default gateway address) as its' own and have you assign a new, unique IP address to your existing firewall / gateway.  It kinda makes sense; EBS is trying to ensure that all of your existing clients go though the new Security Server, and by changing this one IP address on your existing firewall / gateway, you do not have to point every workstation to the new security server.  Of course, EBS is built to be your network, not coexist with your network.  With that said, if you're testing EBS, here's what worked for me.

The Prep wizard will ask you for your Gateway IP address.  Later on in the Planning Wizard, it will ask you to change the IP address of your existing gateway and it will configure the new Security Server with the IP address of your existing Gateway.  

So for your test lab... Lie to it if you don't want to reconfigure your existing firewall / gateway.  I told the tool that my firewall/gateway was at 192.168.1.1 even though it was really located at 192.168.0.1.  This way, the new security server takes the IP I want it to, not my super happy existing firewall that the rest of my network depends upon.

Now that you've provided the configuration information, this information will now be used to setup your EBS management server.  This information will be saved in a file named PlanningWizardData.xml .  You cannot start the installation of the Management Server (Disc2) until you create this file for your environment.  Be sure to save this file to a USB thumb drive, or some place that the installation wizard on Disc2 can find it.  If you're creating a new environment, you'll still need this file, but it will be pretty fast and easy.  The frustrating part to me is that yes, the management server installation asks for this file, but you still need to provide the machine name and IP addresses again.  And, the Messaging Server and TMG (Threat Management Gateway Server) do not use this xml file.  You must still configure the machine names and IP addresses for the messaging and TMG servers. 

I'll add additional posts as I go though the installation process of EBS.

I'm a PC for the small business!

Until next time!

Rob

I'm a PC

When I saw the first Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates commercial, It left me wondering what we were doing.  The next two helped a "bit", but still I was wondering what we were doing.  Now that I've seen the "I'm a PC" commercial, I have a bigger smile on my face.  The reality is that this ad "campaign" is more than just a discussion about Windows Vista, it's the bigger discussion around the computer eco-system that currently exists.

When Windows 95 shipped, there were lines of people waiting to purchase it.  Why?  Because it was revolutionary for the time and it allowed our customers to extend their computing experience beyond their current expectations.  So what changed?  What has really transpired over the last 13 years?  A lot has changed, I agree.  Prior to Windows 95, DOS was the prevalent OS.  People were using Windows 3.x and even Windows for Workgroups, but things were pretty static up until Windows 95.  Windows 95 put us all on an explosive growth curve that accelerated the business value of our desktop computers.  Fast forward to 13 years later and we've a lot behind us; we are working much harder at working with our competitors, and even promoting compatibility between the Windows platform and our competitors.  Look at the certification of VMWare as the Industries First Hypervisor to be validated under our new Microsoft Server Virtualization Validation Program. 

I like the new commercials because they remind people of the work we've done, as well as the work we continue to do.  It's not like we've rested on our Windows 95 laurels...  The Mojave experiment (http://www.mojaveexperiment.com) has been pretty interesting.  I've heard a number of people suggest that it reminds them of the old Coke vs. Pepsi commercials.  It's not that we're trying to take on a competitor with these ads, but we are trying to ask people to look at Windows Vista for Windows Vista and not what other people want you to believe about Vista.  That's the biggest thing... Check it out for yourself and make up your own mind.  When has America ever allowed someone else to tell us what we should think?  I've talked to a number of people that just did not like Windows Vista, and I'm ok with that, but when I'd ask why, they'd give me a quote directly from the Mac ads.  I'd then drill deeper and ask if they've even used Windows Vista and too many times, they would say that they haven't even tried it!  How's that for crazy.  It seems all too commonplace that people are being told what to think without even doing their homework. If you've tried Windows Vista and didn't like it.  Did you really give it a fair shot?  Take it for a few weeks and see how it does.  I'll bet it will grow on you like it has grown on me. 

I'm typing this blog on a Lenovo X61 Tablet.  I love the Tablet PC, and have had one for over five years.  I had one of the original Toshiba tablets and continue to truly appreciate this form factor for both its size and flexibility.  I moved to Windows Vista when we hit Beta 2 so I could take advantage of the improved handwriting recognition in Windows Vista.  I think I can honestly say that I've "hung in there" longer than most and I'm truly glad I stuck with Windows Vista.  I still use Windows XP every now and then, my only XP installation is actually a virtual machine that I use  to test compatibility and functionality. 

My Lenovo has 4 GB of RAM.  I agree that the performance difference between 2 and 4 GB of RAM is significant, 2 GB of RAM just wasn't quite enough. My Lenovo with 4 GB of RAM has been the best performing OS I've ever had.  As far as UAC?  If that's really your hang up with Vista, turn it off.  Or better yet, check out ATC 5.0 and how you can use shims to overcome some of the more common compatibility issues people have encountered.

Tearing down the walls...  This is the message of our new commercials.  Our message is pretty simple.  We do not dictate what hardware you must use, we do not dictate which version of an OS you must use, and we do not limit the available applications that you can use.  Our eco system is open and it's been open for a very long time.  One of the things you'll see soon is the increased level of assistance we're providing to our hardware manufacturers.  You'll see hardware that's not only "Vista Ready", but tuned for Vista.  Drivers have always been the biggest struggle for any Operating System.  The more hardware you support, the more drivers you must develop.  We do not force hardware manufacturers to develop drivers, in fact, a number of my partners have complained about the fact that even some of their new hardware does not have drivers for Vista.  Again, we cannot force hardware manufacturers to develop Vista drivers, but we are going to be providing more assistance to them as they bring new products to market.

Check out our new ads and think about all of the walls we continue to take down.

I'm a PC and I'm proud of it!

Until next time!

Rob

HPC is Cool, but did it just get a whole lot Cooler??

Microsoft, Cray and Intel team up for cheaper supercomputer

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2008184349_msftcray170.html

I've always loved the idea of the Cray Super Computers, now Cray is building one to go under your desk.  Have you ever wished you could have your workstation for normal work, and another, more powerful computer to crunch all of your big requests??  Cray has a name for killer computers, now they have built one that can go right under your desk without assistance from IT to setup or configure!  HPC, our High Performance Computing platform, is built on top of Windows Server and it's built to crunch these big requests quickly and efficiently.  If you have users that are asking for bigger workstations so they can crunch numbers, think about an HPC platform like the Cray.  Instead of buying 3 or 4 people larger than normal workstations for those intense computations every now and then, what about one HPC platform that they all have access to?  Check this out for cost efficient performance <smirk>.

The CX1 will support up to 64 processor cores of up to 3.4 gigahertz each. It will have a peak performance of 786 gigaflops.

One gigaflop is a billion floating-point operations per second. In 1991, Cray had a supercomputer that could hit 10 gigaflops at a cost of $40 million.

Check this out, its another smart way to provide our users with the value they are looking for, while maintaining a consistent environment and user experience.

Until next time!

Rob

Questions from our Session Today

Today I presented my first TS2 session with our new content.  We discussed Windows Server 2008, Response Point, Windows Vista, SBS 2008 / EBS 2008 and we finished up with a discussion around Software plus Services.  We had a super discussion, but there were a few questions that I wasn't able to answer , so I'm going to blog about them (and what I've found) here.

Here are my questions so far:

• Can I migrate a Server 2003 forest to SBS 2008?  I haven't really thought about this situation until now, but I did some quick looking and found this:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/winserverMigration/thread/365ef198-e5b9-4c60-85ae-7372337d6f0c/

While they talk about migrating from AD 2008 to SBS 2008, the scenario makes sense.  Of course step one for migrating from Server 2003 to SBS 2008 in this scenario is to upgrade your AD 2003 to AD 2008.  I think the AD upgrade is important, and you will also have to extend AD to support Exchange 2007.  I have an earlier posting that talks about extending the 2003 Schema, so check that out if you want to upgrade your Schema.  Once that schema upgrade is complete, you'll also need to extend your schema to support Exchange 2007.  I haven't tried this myself, but it really looks like a viable solution, so give it a try and let me know if it works for you.

• Virtualization - We didn't talk much about it today, but I have some pretty good blogs on it.  Check out my other blogs and let me know if you have questions.

• Solution Accelerators - This one is a hidden gem.  Check these out, they will help you deploy solutions faster.

http://www.microsoft.com/solutionaccelerators 

We have a solution accelerator that talks about our Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool. This will help you setup a an easy process to ensure any of your offline VMs receive the same updates your production VMs receive. 

• We talked about the managed services opportunity.  Check out

www.quickstartonlineservices.com

This will bring you up to speed on what we're doing around managed services and the opportunities our partners have to continue to grow their level of engagement with customers.

These are all the questions I remember from our discussion this afternoon.  If I receive more questions, I'll share the questions and answers here as well.

Until next time!

Rob

I passed my CISSP!

I did it!  Boy the wait for my results was FOREVER!  I took the exam three weeks ago, but just got my results this week.  It actually took 11 business days to get my results, but that 11 days was like an eternity!  I haven't said much about this exam up until now because it's a little hard to be confident, or cocky, about a 6 hour, 250 question exam, and I'm a bit of a sandbagger.  WOW!  The exam itself was a test of endurance and knowledge.  10 Domains was a lot of information.  While they say the content is a mile wide and an inch deep, it is still a lot of content!  I do not want to jinx anything or anyone, but I didn't see a lot of what I thought was the "harder" stuff they could have asked.  With 10 domains, it's hard to ask every hard question on every test, but I did expect more...  The thing I liked most of all was that there were only a few questions that left me without a clue.  I could get down to two possible answers on most of the questions, but there were a few questions that I just did not get.  Since 25 of the questions on the exam are not graded, I'd just tell myself that the confusing question was one of the 25 upgraded questions <smirk>.

If you're interesting in pursuing your CISSP, here's how I prepared:

I took the 6 day boot camp and opted for the evening review sessions as well.  To me, the instructor will make or break you.  I've had a number of instructors that have left me wanting more, but my boot camp instructor, Monica Gonzalez, was great!  The evening review sessions were helpful because we would spend the evenings reviewing the days content.  But the evenings did make for very long days.  Our days started at 8:00 or 8:30 AM and a couple of days ran until after 9:00 PM.  Again, our job was to learn and prepare for the exam; so the long hours were worth it, But I wish we would have been able to end earlier each evening so I could have had more personal study time.  The lack of personal study time made me very anxious.  I felt that every day would leave me with too many questions and not enough time to search for the answers.  I'm not one to just memorize facts, and this test isn't about how many facts you can memorize, but it is about your ability to reason through the facts (and only the facts) of each question.

The boot camp was good.  The exam was scheduled for Sunday, so Saturday was a review day.  Saturday was a good day, and that's when everyone was able to get a few hours to study on their own.  We started Saturday as a group and took a 125 question practice exam.  The exam was really good at getting our minds in test mode, and it helped point out our stupid mistakes.  Mistakes ranged from misreading the questions to reading too much into the questions, to doubting our initial answers and changing them.  The "changing answers" situation is a double edged sword.  When Monica graded our practice tests, she pointed out how many changed answers she found.  This was pretty telling for some, but it was actually a wash for me.  I corrected some questions from right to wrong, but I also changed some questions from wrong to right.  Monica kept saying "trust your gut", and she was right.  When I took the actual exam I actually did  change a few questions.  The funny part was that each time I went to change an answer, I would hear Monica in my head saying "trust your gut!". It took me a while to get my head into the actual exam, so I went back and reviewed the first 1/3 of the questions once I finished the first pass of the exam.  I found a few questions on the first few pages that I didn't read right the first time, so I spent some time on them, but then I got to the point that I was done.  The exam was not a race, so I took my time and finished it in about five hours.  I've never been one to spend too much time on each question.  I've always felt that either I know the material, or I don't, so it's very seldom that I agonize over more than a few questions on any exam. 

In part 2 I'll talk about things that did and didn't go well...

Until next time!

Rob

I passed my CISSP! (part 2)

So I passed.  There are a things that I think I did well during my preparation, and there are things I wish I would have done differently.  I'll rattle off a few of my thoughts in case you want to prepare for this exam.

What I did that I liked:

• While I always have my phone with me, and I always travel with my Tablet PC; I left them turned off most of the week.  This was a HUGE test for me.  I'm an email junkie, and can't normally go two hours without checking mail, but I was able to keep my phone off, or at least on silent the whole week.   Keep your phone and computer off because they will distract you from the discussion.  When my phone was on silent, I'd still catch myself checking mail during the discussions. I would try very hard to leave my phone off until the breaks.  There was so much content that we could completely cover a topic in as little as 15 mins.  If you were not paying attention, you were sunk.
• Do not spend the evenings doing email.  I set the expectations with my team that I would be "out" all week and I stuck to that.  I set my out of office message and made it clear that I was unavailable all week.  Typically, I'd do work in the evenings when I'm in training, but for this exam, I was very committed to staying off of email.  I did not feel compelled to respond to any email that week.  We all know we could spend hours every evening catching up on email, but DO NOT DO IT.  Keep your head in the game.  Honestly, everything can either wait, or be handled by someone else.  Don't end up doing your studying and your normal job half way.  Most likely, you'll end up failing at both!
• Get plenty of sleep.  I don't do well if I go without sleep for more than a few days, so I tried hard to get a good 7 or 8 hours of sleep every day.
• Eat well.  My boot camp included breakfast and lunch.  The hotel breakfast was a typical hotel breakfast, so I was comfortable with breakfast, but lunch was not good at all.  I went out to lunch a couple of the days because I just couldn't take the hotel lunch.  Dinner was always up to us, so I'd try to get out and get some air and grab food I was accustomed to eating. 
• Take your breaks and do something you enjoy.  I rode my motorcycle to and from the boot camp in Atlanta so when I'd get stressed, I'd go for a ride.  I have to have my head 100% into the bike when I ride, so it really helped clear my mind.  You have to do something to clear your head, and the bike does a great job of helping me do just that.
• Pay attention.  This is really hard for 6 straight days.  We had an hour for lunch and an hour for dinner.  Aside from these two hours and the brakes, we would be actively covering content all day long.  It's hard to keep your head in the game that long, but you just have to do it.  Unfortunately, I don't have any good ideas, just try to eliminate as many distractions as possible.

What would I do differently ?

• My suggestion is that you need to prepare for the boot camp in advance.  They describe the boot camp as "bringing out the information you already know".  Not, "we will teach you everything you need to know".  I didn't quite catch that one before I got there, so let me say it again:  If you really want to understand all of the content, unless you're a genius, you'll need additional study.  Since the exam is the last day of the boot camp, you'll need to have a solid background coming into the training. 
• Read a good prep book before the boot camp.  While you need to have experience in at least two of the ten domains to sit for the exam, the reality is that you need strong knowledge in all 10 domains to pass this exam.  You need to have a good handle on most all of the content going in, or you will feel very overwhelmed. 
• Make sure you are registered for the camp AND the exam.  I was confirmed for the boot camp, but did not receive my confirmation for the exam, so I could not take the exam on Sunday with the rest of my class.  What a nightmare!  I was ready to test and couldn't.  I had to come back and take the exam a few weeks later.  I can come up with a dozen excuses on what happened, but the bottom line is that I didn't realize I had to look for two confirmations until I arrived at the boot camp.  Make sure you get everything setup in advance so you can spend the week paying attention to the content.

Let me know if you have any specific questions about preparation.  I'm happy to answer any questions you have, but I will not discuss any of the questions.  There are a number of test taking skills that will help you be at your best for this exam.  The boot camp did a good job of highlighting the skills that will be the most valuable during the exam. 

I'm personally thrilled to pass this exam, I feel as though I "lived" the content for about a month.  While I was very unhappy that I had to wait to take the exam, it was helpful to have a little extra time to study.  Honestly though, I didn't get in that much additional study time. I still wish I would have been able to test with the rest of my class on the Sunday following the boot camp.

I feel the CISSP is a good "Bar" that demonstrates you have a minimum level of knowledge with regard to security.  Security continues to be one of the top five concerns for our customers and I feel that we need to be able to assist them in addressing the ongoing concerns.  While I do not feel that this certification makes me a security "expert", my desire for this credential has been so that I was be able to provide a base level of competence in the area of security as I continue to assist our customers in the remediation of their security concerns. 

Until next time!

Rob