Microsoft Exams –  70-296

70-296 Exam Details

Number of Questions = 50*      Including 8-10 Simulation style questions.

Pass mark = 700    35/50

Time =  2hrs 10 Minutes

* At the beginning of the exam Microsoft reserve the right to add some beta questions, so your total maybe slightly different.  Indeed my total of 50 may have included some beta questions.

Preparation Tips

Exam Syllabus for 70-296

If you hold the MCSE 2000 qualification, then you can take two exams to upgrade to MCSE 2003.  These special fast-track exams are 70-292 and 70-296.  By the way, on the MCSE 2000 track, exam 70-216 was a ‘killer’.  I thought that 70-216 Networking was twice as hard as the other exams; my point is that there is no such viscous exam on the MCSE 2003 track.  In my opinion, the 70-296 is no harder than the other exams.

The general impression of 70-296 is a real techie exam, challenging but fair.  If your day job is a hand’s on network administrator then you will have nothing to fear.  These are the topics that you need to know in depth:

• DNS -> DDNS.  Stub Domains, forwarding
• RAS -> RRAS  RIP and OSPF.  L2TP, EAP
• DHCP and DHCP Relay
• Certificate Services
• SUS, MBSA mbsacli.exe
• Disaster Recovery, Backup & Restore, ASR, DCPROMO /adv
• Shadow Copy services – TWClient
• Domain and Forest Planning, FSMO, GC. Forest Trusts, Forest and Domain Levels
• Terminal Services
• Group Policy, gpupdate, secedit, gpresult and Security Analyser
• Performance Monitoring, Memory, Processor, Disk and Network bottlenecks
• Clustering and how it differs from Network Load Balancing

How to Revise