Kirkian Computing

Tag: Microsoft

  • My first 50 certifications

    I did my first (vocational) IT exam in 1999. This was after an annual appraisal from my (then) manager, who said “I’ve spoken to lots of people, and they’re all very impressed with your work. However, there’s no way for me to quantify your performance, so you don’t get a pay rise.” Based on that, I decided that it would be useful to have some objective evidence of my abilities from a neutral 3rd party, so I took the Visual Basic 5.0 exam and became a Microsoft Certified Professional.

    Fast forward to 2023: I’ve now passed 41 exams and earned 50 certifications. In all honesty, this process has been a bit haphazard; I’ve picked certifications based on what looked interesting at the time, or what related to a skill I’d been using at work, rather than having a clear roadmap of where I wanted my career to go. I’ve also sometimes leant towards the Pokémon approach of “gotta collect them all!” So, I think it’s time to look back and review which of these were worthwhile, and which I’d recommend to other people.

    NB I’m not including my university degrees in this list, because they’re academic rather than vocational. I’m also not including the European Computer Driving License (ECDL), because that’s aimed at end users rather than IT professionals.

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  • Microsoft Security, Compliance, and Identity Fundamentals (SC-900)

    In July 2021, I took the Microsoft Security, Compliance, and Identity Fundamentals (SC-900) exam.
    NB The exam content has changed since then, so some of the specifics in this blog post might be out of date.

    According to the exam description:
    “Candidates should be familiar with Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365 and want to understand how Microsoft security, compliance, and identity solutions can span across these solution areas to provide a holistic and end-to-end solution.”
    I’ve previously taken MS-900 (Microsoft 365 Fundamentals) and AZ-900 (Azure Fundamentals), and I’d recommend them as a starting point to address the prerequisites.

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  • Microsoft Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900)

    In May 2021, I took the Microsoft Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900) exam. This is similar to Microsoft 365 Fundamentals (MS-900), i.e. it’s asking about what the technology does rather than how you use it. However, I thought this was a better exam than MS-900, i.e. it was more relevant to what you actually need to know for a job, and it’s not just acting as a marketing brochure. This isn’t a formal prerequisite for any other Azure exams (e.g. at associate level), but it seems like a good place to start.

    This is also a good exam if you’re on a budget: the training and the exam itself were free of charge! More precisely, I attended a Microsoft Azure virtual training day. The name is a slight misnomer: it was 2½ hours on 2 consecutive days. That training isn’t enough to prepare you for the exam on its own, but it’s useful as a high level overview. When I booked the exam, I entered the email address that I used to book the virtual training day, then that address was linked to my Microsoft certification account, and I was credited with a voucher for the full cost of the exam. I did the exam at home (via online proctoring); I’m not sure whether the voucher is also valid if you attend a Pearson Vue test centre.

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  • Microsoft 365 Fundamentals (MS-900)

    In April 2019, I took the Microsoft 365 Fundamentals (MS-900) exam.

    Microsoft offer free training; they say that this will take 4 hours 11 minutes, although you might find that you need to repeat some of the videos if you didn’t fully understand it the first time through (e.g. if you got distracted). It would also be useful to supplement this training with hands-on experience; if you don’t have access to Microsoft 365 already, you can get a single user subscription to Exchange Online (plan 1) for £3/month (+VAT), which won’t break the bank.

    You might also find these blog posts useful:

    The actual exam costs £69 (+VAT) which is definitely at the cheaper end of the spectrum, and I took it from home via online proctoring. According to the FAQ, the actual exam lasts 60 minutes, but the total “seat time” is 90 minutes (allowing for time to read the NDA etc). Unusually, they don’t specify how many questions there will be:
    The number of questions on an exam is subject to change as we update it over time to keep current changes in the technology and job role. Most Microsoft Certification exams contain between 40-60 questions; however, the number can vary depending on the exam.
    My exam had 36 questions, and some of those had multiple parts (e.g. a list of statements where you had to mark each statement as true or false). However, the content has changed since then (most recently on 2020-04-14), so your experience might be different. As another example, @Microsoft365Pro said:
    “I passed this exam on 31/01/2019 the day of the release. I had 63 questions in this particular paper.”
    Either “63” is a typo for “36” or we had significantly different exams! The whole thing took me about an hour; I wasn’t pushed for time, but I didn’t have loads of time left over, so I think they got it about right.

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  • Active Directory lockouts

    A lot of organisations set up security policies so that users will be locked out if they enter the wrong password too many times. The idea is to prevent brute force attacks, where an attacker could sit there all day running through the dictionary until they guess the correct password. The downside is that this can lead to Denial of Service attacks, i.e. someone could deliberately enter the wrong password in order to stop other people from logging in. A better solution is to have a throttle, e.g. if you enter the wrong password then you have to wait 30 seconds until your next attempt. That would slow down an attacker without being a major inconvenience to legitimate users. Unfortunately, Windows domain controllers don’t support this natively, and I haven’t come across any third party software that does the same thing.

    Leaving aside deliberate attacks, sometimes this can happen by accident. A common cause is that someone changes their password, but their mobile device still has the old password (to access email), and it automatically makes enough attempts to lock the account. There are some other common causes linked to a recent password change, e.g. if there is a scheduled task or a service running under a user’s account, or if they have mapped drives or cached credentials for websites.

    A while back, I came across a case that was a bit more interesting. The root cause turned out to be a mismatch in authentication protocols, so the error messages were misleading: there was never actually an incorrect password! Read on for the technical details.

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  • Definition Update for Windows Defender – infinite loop

    I recently came across an odd situation involving Windows Server 2016 and WSUS updates.

    On the WSUS server, I typically see several new Definition Updates for Windows Defender (KB2267602) every day. E.g. on 2017-11-26, Microsoft released:

    • 1.257.995.0
    • 1.257.996.0
    • 1.257.998.0
    • 1.257.1001.0
    • 1.257.1003.0
    • 1.257.1005.0

    The update with the highest number will supersede the others, so I only approve that one. I then install this update on my other servers, and verify that they’re all up to date with patches (0 needed).
    NB Windows Defender only runs on Windows Server 2016, not Windows Server 2012 R2 (or older). I’ve only tested this on core server, not the GUI edition.

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  • Disabling 16 bit applications in Windows

    In January, someone at Google discovered a bug in Windows that had been there for 17 years. (This was reported at The Register, among other places.) Microsoft have now released a patch, as described in Security Bulletin MS10-015, so it’s no longer a problem. However, I think that the details are interesting, particularly if you intend to move to 64-bit Windows at some point.

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  • BlackBerry vs Exchange 2007

    Exchange 2007 has a few options for remote access to email: you can use Outlook Web Access, or ActiveSync with a smartphone. In particular, it only takes a couple of minutes to configure an iPhone. However, yesterday it took me all day to get a BlackBerry working.

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  • Ribbon Hero

    Microsoft recently released Ribbon Hero. This is an add-in for Office 2007 and Office 2010, and the idea is to earn points by completing challenges (e.g. formatting a table). In the process, you’ll become familiar with the new user interface. The name is obviously inspired by “Guitar Hero”, but I think it’s unlikely that this will be quite so much fun at parties. It does sound rather Dilbert-esque… “The room is hushed. He puts the title in bold, and the crowd goes wild! Encore!”

    Still, it sounds like an interesting idea. According to ZDNet: “It taps into social and adaptive learning paradigms and important research on motivation and learning.” I know that a lot of people are reluctant to use Office 2007 because it looks so different, so I’m willing to give this a go. Unfortunately, it has some pretty fundamental problems, which make it completely useless to me.

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  • LUA part 5 (of 5): Related technologies

    This post is part 5 of a series about using a limited (standard) account in Windows for everyday activities rather than logging in as a computer administrator all the time. (You may want to read parts 1, 2, 3, and 4 before continuing.)

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