70-411 Microsoft Administering Windows Server 2012 exam – Passed

I am still working towards my MCSA 2012 certification, and today I passed the Microsoft 70-411 exam for Administering Windows Server 2012 with a score of 889/1000. This means that I have just 1 more exam to go, being 70-412 Configuring Advanced Windows Server 2012 Services. In this post I’ll cover the materials I studied to pass 70-411.

At the moment I have completed 2 of the 3 exams:

70-410 Installing and Configuring Windows Server 2012 – Complete!
70-411 Administering Windows Server 2012 – Complete!
70-412 Configuring Advanced Windows Server 2012 Services

Study Materials

Update April 2015: I have updated the links to refer to the updated R2 materials, as this exam now covers the R2 version of Windows Server 2012.

To study for this exam I made use of the following materials:

I watched the Trainsignal videos first as in my experience they seem to be a bit easier to take in, things are explained at a slower pace and you can take in the basics. After that I watched the CBT Nuggets videos which as usual provided further technical information. Alongside watching both of these series I also read through the book listed above to complement the material, along the way I also read through TechNet articles online of any content I did not fully understand.

This was the first time that I made use of TechNet articles this way, previously I had only read them if my books referred to them specifically, however this time after some advice I decided to use them a bit more in depth and this turned out to be a very good source of free information that I highly recommend.

After watching and reading all the content once over the course of 4-6 weeks and steadily taking it in, I went through it all again within a 2 week period before the exam. I prefer to go through everything twice as I find I take it in more and pick things up that I may have missed.

Along the way I was taking down notes of anything I thought important or wanted to remember, and spent the day before the exam exclusively reviewing these.

I probably could have finished the 70-411 off sooner, however I had a break for a month or so after completing 70-410. I plan on taking another break for now before getting started on my final exam for MCSA 2012, being 70-412. On the Microsoft website for the exam it states that the book for the course is expected to release in August 2013 and the link results in a 404 not found error. I contacted Microsoft in regards to this and was told that the book is expected to release in January 2014, so next year. The exams will also contain content based around R2 from January too as this was recently released so I suspect that this is the reason on the delay, to add in the R2 content to keep things up to date. If so I’m unsure how far I’ll be able to get with the lack of a book to read so I may have to wait it out, in my experience the video study alone is not enough.


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  1. Congrats on passing the 411. I used the Orin Thomas book for my study as well. I am sitting the 412 in a weeks tome so I will let you know how things go….I have been using they CBT Nugget course on the 412 along with technet.

    The exams change in Jan so I wanted to get this out of the way before they change :)

    Good luck studying for the 412

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