A Certified Master: Microsoft and MOSS
December 24, 2008
Randy Muller wrote an interesting article about Microsoft’s newest certification track, the Microsoft Certified Master. You can read his story “The New Microsoft Certified Master” here. Mr. Muller noted that the Master program has “generated some confusion about its purpose, scope, and place within the certification hierarchy.” His article’s purpose was to clarify the program. For me the most important comment in the write up was:
The costs of the tests are part of the US $18,000 dollar program fee – but are expensive if you need to retake them.
I know about Jedi knights and black belts in karate, but I don’t know if I would have the desire, stamina, or cash to fork over $18,000 to become a certified master of SharePoint 2007. SharePoint 2007 is a complicated amalgam of functions and in order to deliver a successful hook up of SharePoint and Fast Enterprise Search Platform, I would have to be a heck of a lot more intelligent than I am. With SharePoint a simple challenge can expand to consume considerable time. Toss in Fast ESP and you have an even more daunting task. I would assert that a single Certified Master would not be up to the task. If I step back from a program to create a Certified Master, I am of the opinion that the certification is designed to generate cash and overly confident individuals. When tackling the job of hooking two Microsoft servers together, the task may be impossible. A Certified Master will fail just as surely as my engineers. Try this. Select any three Microsoft server products such as Dynamics, Performance Point, and Exchange plus SharePoint. Now configure these to make their content and services available to a SharePoint user. If you have difficulties getting those graphical reports from each application into SharePoint, you are in my corner of the world. We found that the transport mechanism that works okay is plain vanilla Excel. A lowly spreadsheet becomes the way to display data in a multi server environment, not the servers’ built in graphing functions. Maybe $18,000 includes common sense. Well, maybe not. The Certified Master just spent $18,000.
Stephen Arnold, December 24, 2008
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One Response to “A Certified Master: Microsoft and MOSS”
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Stephen, I concur. I think it will only be available to all but the larger solution integrators and even they I think won’t like having an already in demand resource, being out for 3 weeks taking exams.
Even if you gain this new certification, I don’t think you could recoup the investment easily either as your existing architects will already be charged at a premium rate above ‘normal’ consultants. To add another layer in won’t be workable and doubt clients will swallow this increase in cost.