Certification

Community Awards

Citrix Technology Professional (CTP)

2009-2011

Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP)

2002-2007 (Terminalservices)

Just a maniac in certification?

Information technology offers thousands of areas in specialization and probably the same number of options to certify the knowledge you gained over the years. Sometimes it might be helpful or even required to prove your skills formally. Attending more and more courses or spending time in studying technologies and products you'll accumulate those exam results. One time you also could be certified in emptying the waist boxes...

Should certified knowledge be based on long-term practice and doings or - on the other hand - does it make more sense to learn new technologies from scratch by starting with in-depth technical research? May the last option guarantee a later success in daily business, design and consulting? This is an ongoing and also never-ending discussion and a good mixture of both approaches will make sense anyway. I personally think that primarily practice guys may have succeeded in some of their installations based on luck but not due to conceptual design skills. Maybe you know the wording: "a best practice analyzer might show you enhancement options that address errors made in advance"...

My bookshelf grows continuously: university scripts competing against IT literature, fighting head-to-head. Unfortunately each average room just provides you with four walls to mount the shelves on it. Deducting the space required for windows and doors and other furniture as well, there's really limited room for expansion...

Microsoft certification

Microsoft's server platform has been my primary focus since the early 90s. It happened by chance in those days that I took over the technical responsibility for design, implementation and support on NT4-deployments at all affected customers' networks. The major market leader in client/server-networks obviously had been Novell and the "alternate" operating system divisions were under-staffed.

Starting with NT4 I was part of any migration, evolution and technological update cycle which allowed me to be involved in any new kind of enhancement and backoffice line product version that was released out to the public. Inevitable a formal qualification was added over the course of time...

New generation certification track

The refreshed methods in Microsoft education and certification processes focusses on specific technology aspects. This dramatically increases a formal specialization and product knowledge.

Certified-before-RTM: MCITP Charter-Member on Enterprise Messaging Administrator, Enterprise Administrator, Server Administrator, Enterprise Support Technician and Consumer Support Technician.

Certified-before-RTM: MCTS Charter-Member on Windows 7, Windows Server 2008, Hyper-V Virtualization, SharePoint Services 3.0, SharePoint Server 2007 and Office Communications 2007.

Legacy certification track

While Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003 were in development, I succeeded in completing my technical training based on their betas and release candiate binaries. This allowed me being certified in the same time when those operating systems where officially launched. :-)

MCSE Security

Windows 2000
Windows Server 2003

MCSE Messaging

Windows 2000
Windows Server 2003

Certified-before-RTM: MCSE Early Achiever on Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003.

Transcript

Access my online shared transcript here
    Transcript ID: 690604
    Access code: rood160975

Direct access my offline transcript here.

Citrix certification

My personal favorite is deploying applications (or the more general term application delivery) relying on Microsoft terminalservices and VDI solutions. In my eyes, if you're faced with professional enterprise requirements (large farm sizing, massive consolidation, complex access via intranet and extranet users, etc.) you need the Citrix Delivery Center product line to achive your goals. I promoted this technology one of my primary areas of specialization and added exam by exam over the course of time:

CCIA Early Achiever

XP-Plattform (Audit 11/2004), Access Suite 4 (10/2006)
Virtualization (05/2010)

Among the german participants I successfully passed the first Integration Architect Lab in 2004 already. In contrast to other exams that typically get scored in electronic manner, this lab was organized in an auditable style with simulated real-world hands-on and was conducted by Citrix itself. This way of testing was discontinued later due to the complexity and associated costs. Future audits failback on electronic testing methods.

CCEE Early Achiever

Virtualization (05/2010)

CCEA

From MetaFrame platform up to
Citrix Delivery Center / Citrix Cloud Services

CCSP

From MetaFrame platform up to
Virtual Computing

Feature-complete consulting on RTM timeframe: CCA Early Achiever on Application Virtualization, Desktop Virtualization, Server Virtualization and Application Networking.

Transcript

Access my online certification status here
    Authorization code: lNZCKDoK

Direct access my offline certification status here.