Exam 70–227 is available as of February 27, 2001There are 55 Questions in this exam and the exam is form based that means you fill in the form like filling in a survey on the Internet. To pass this exam you need to get 720/1000 and you have 160 minutes to do the exam in. Use as much of this time as you can that’s why they give you the time. Credit toward certificationWhen you pass 70-227, you achieve MCP (Microsoft Certified Professional) status. You also earn an elective credit toward your (MCSE) Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer and also your MCSA certification. I have split the exam preparation into a few tutorials and will release it as a sequential group of tutorials. This is not a brain dump as I feel that brain dumps dissolve the integrity of an exam, and you only learn the answers and not the actual work or knowledge needed for the exam. By reading these tutorials I will show you what thinking patterns the examiners use when testing you. You will pass this exam if you think about the questions carefully and draw the scenarios out on the sheet of paper provided. Also use the time that is allotted to you that’s what its there for. Mark the questions you are not sure about and go back to them when you are finished with the exam. Review them and see why your answer is an educated one. I have noticed that in the exam they always give you two answers in the ISA exam that are always obviously wrong then they give two answers that are close but only one of them is right. Read the question properly don’t rush when they ask about outbound connections or connections from a client going out onto the internet make sure you read the question and don’t get trapped by giving tem the answer that is 100% right except for the fact that it has protocol filters and those are all inbound. Books used for preparation: I know there are many ISA books out there that will help you prepare for this exam. If you are serious about ISA and want to make a career out of it then you should get your self the ISA bible better known as Tom Shinder’s book Configuring ISA Server 2000 : Building Firewalls for Windows 2000
I really like this book, but can’t put my finger on it but something is really good about it, maybe it’s the rich content or the way they present the information in the book or maybe the summaries and FAQs at the end of each chapter. Whatever it is good Job Tom and Deb. I have read this book many times and referred to it when in doubt and found it to be very useful when doing day to day ISA installations or even when trying to motivate the product to management. The key note here is that all of the exam content is in the book; you now need to learn how to apply it. Experience is your best teacher.Since humans remember in pictures it’s important to do things yourself, it becomes easier for you to remember what you are doing. I normally draw what I am going to be doing in the planning phase, and then look at the drawing for reference. Many questions in the exam were very similar to my drawings. It is a good idea to draw what the exam question is asking of you, not detailed diagrams but circles and squares. Circles for clients with WPC abbreviations for Web Proxy Client or FWC for Firewall Client and squares for the ISA servers. I found this helps quite a bit because the questions sometimes waffle and tell you that you are the administrator of an organization and that you are doing this and that bla bla bla and by the time you get to what they want from you are thinking of how nice it would be to work at that organization and how you get to limit the users and how much bandwidth they have at this organization. At the end of the question you have lost focus and you have to read the 30 line question again, so what I recommend is draw the scenario even if the question has its own exhibits ( you can scribble on yours)I find this makes the exam at least 15% easier. Set up your own ISA machine.You can set up your own ISA machine to test different scenarios, arrays, caching and all of the typical ISA features. This exam asks you negligees about the ISA features like what you must do if you have this problem with these conditions. You don’t need a lot of hardware to set up ISA in fact if you work for a company and you are in IT and you have access to a P3 with 256 Megs of ram and a hard disk that is bigger than three gigs I am sure it will all work fine. Using an application called VMware you can install multiple machines within one machine I recommend you only install two in one i.e. 1+1=2 Using this machine you can install two ISA servers join them to the same array. They are on the same machine so don’t confuse the two. In preparation for the ISA server Exam I have found the best way to prepare for this exam to have hands on Enterprise experience. The below 1-5 points are an extract from http://www.microsoft.com/traincert/exams/70-227.asp and I have added my comments and edited it so that it would be easier to read and only the relevant information is left.
2. Configuring and Troubleshooting ISA Server Services
Configure H.323 Gatekeeper for audio and video conferencing.
3. Configuring, Managing, and Troubleshooting Policies and Rules
Create and configure access control and bandwidth policies.
Troubleshoot access problems.
Manage ISA Server arrays in an enterprise.
4. Deploying, Configuring, and Troubleshooting the Client Computer
5. Monitoring, Managing, and Analyzing ISA Server Use
Analyze the performance of ISA Server by using reports. Report types include summary, Web usage, application usage, traffic and utilization, and security. I did see this in the exam.
Summary: The information in this tutorial is strictly for educational purposes and should be used to help you after you have studied ISA completely from experience MOC (Microsoft official curriculum) and also from reading ISA documentation found at isaserver.org and by reading ISA content rich books, like the book written by Dr Tom. Look at the tutorial B on Exam 70-227 for example of questions and tips on what to study. This tutorial is not a substitute for not studding the material I mention above and I urge that understand that I am not responsible for you passing your exam, you are! |
