Bloggings of Jon Cortez

Passed both SharePoint Application Development exams: 70-541 and 70-542

jcortez — Sat, 17 May 2008 10:33:00 GMT

I passed the last two SharePoint exams I set out to take this week with excellent scores. Thursday, I took Exam 70-541 – Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Application Development. And then yesterday, I took Exam 70-542 – Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Application Development. I'm done with certification exams...for now :-)

OBA Composition Reference Toolkit Version 2.0

jcortez — Thu, 15 May 2008 03:22:00 GMT

The OBA Composition Reference Toolkit (OCRT) is a reference application that showcases the composition capabilities of the Microsoft Office system. Information Workers can compose and deploy Office Business Applications (OBAs) by grouping together semantically related OBA components (such as workflows, document libraries, lists, web parts, VSTO add-ins, Business Intelligence reports, etc).

As a Solution Architect on the V1 release of the OCRT, I primarily worked on the OBA Composition Server and was responsible for the metadata services (Metadata Catalog and OBA Composition Metadata Web Services). I just downloaded the VPC for the V2 release and test drove it. All I can say is that I am extremely proud to be a part of it.

Check it out here. You can also download the source code and use it as examples for your own projects.

Passed Exam 070-630 - TS: Configuring Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

jcortez — Thu, 15 May 2008 02:53:00 GMT

This week is SharePoint exam week for me. Last week, I set out to take and pass all 4 SharePoint exams this week. Mostly, to satisfy the goals set for me this quarter at work. At the same time, I'm curious on how I will do on these exams (it's been a while since I took MS Certification exams). And I also think I can use this experience and mentor my team and get them all certified as well.

On with the great news - this afternoon, I just took the second exam 070-630 and I aced it again! For some reason, I find this exam easier than 070-631.

Two down...two to go!

Passed Exam 070-631 - TS: Configuring Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

jcortez — Tue, 13 May 2008 22:59:00 GMT

I just took exam 070-631 a couple of hours ago and I'm proud to announce that I aced the exam (perfect score). In the exam, there were several questions about load balancing, alternate access mapping, logging, MOM, and ISA Server. I think these are the more difficult questions in the exam.

Next up for me is exam 070-630 which I will schedule this Thursday or Friday. I'll let you know how it goes.

After that, I'll tackle the two SharePoint Application Development exams: Exam 70-541: TS: Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 - Application Development and Exam 70-542 TS: Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 - Application Development.

Hello Blog World

jcortez — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 21:47:00 GMT

Welcome to my personal blog. Let me start by introducing myself. I'm Jon Cortez and I've been living in the Seattle area for the past 12 years. I work in Bellevue for Statera (a consulting company headquartered in Denver) as a Senior SharePoint Architect. I'm in-charge of building our SharePoint consulting practice here in Seattle. On this blog, I'll be posting things related to MOSS 2007 and other Microsoft technologies that I believe would be of value to other technologists out there. As a consultant, each day is a day of problem solving for me. And my goal is to share those experiences (the joys and frustrations) working with technology.

Feel free to leave a comment/feedback and let me know what you think.