How I passed SharePoint 2010 exam 70-667 (Part 4 of 4)

​​​Looking for the downloadable PDF? Click .

 

I passed the 70-667 exam back in December 2010, i.e. well over 18 months ago. This means that the exam I sat did not include content related to Service Pack 1. This post is therefore speculative in nature and simply reflects what I would revise and practice were I to sit the exam now.

It’s been well over a year since I passed the SharePoint 2010 70-667 exam and uploaded the first part of this blog series. Since then, the series has had over 30,000 hits and makes up over a quarter of the total visits to this site, leading me to believe that the content is of interest. By far the most frequent question I have had over the last few months is “where is part four“?

There are a few reasons why I haven’t posted part 4 up until now, but the main one is that I took very few notes at the time on the  under the heading “Maintaining a SharePoint Environment”, so didn’t think this post would be of much value. However, due to the large volume of comments in recent weeks I wanted to reply with something other than “I didn’t do much revision on this area so there isn’t a part 4”.

As such, this part is a little different to the previous posts in the series. I will simply provide a recommended reading list based on both the skills measured and also Microsoft’s  to keep things relevant. As is typical for a Microsoft exam, this exam requires hands-on as well as academic knowledge so simply reading this material won’t mean that you pass the exam.

In case you missed them, here are the other parts in this series:

In part 3 I promised a downloadable PDF that covers the entire series so… . Enjoy!

  1. Maintaining a SharePoint Environment (25 per cent)

Back up and restore a SharePoint environment.

From the 

“This objective applies to on-premise and/or SharePoint Online and may include but is not limited to: configuring backup settings; backing up and restoring content, search, and service application databases; detaching and attaching databases; and exporting lists and sites”

Recommended reading:

  • Chapters 9 and 10 of , by John Ferringer and Sean McDonough

Recommended learning activities:

  • Practice backing up a farm using PowerShell, Central Administration and the SQL Server tools.
  • Practice using the end user “backup” tools – i.e. exporting list and document library content, saving sites as templates.
  • Backup the Search service application using PowerShell, Central Administration and the SQL Server tools. Ensure that you also backup the index files.

Monitor and analyze a SharePoint environment.

From the 

“This objective may include but is not limited to: generating health, administrative, and Web analytics reports; interpreting usage and trace logs; identifying and resolving health and performance issues”

Recommended reading:

Recommended learning activities:

  • Practicing resolving issues using the SharePoint 2010 health analyser
  • Review the SharePoint 2010 diagnostic logs – try using  for this.
  • Practice reviewing each of the report types mentioned in the recommended reading list above.

Optimize the performance of a SharePoint environment.

From the 

“This objective applies to on-premise and/or SharePoint Online and may include but is not limited to: configuring resource throttling (large list management, object model override); configuring remote Binary Large Objects (BLOB) storage and BLOB and object caching; and optimizing services”

Recommended reading:

Recommended learning activities:

  • Play with the resource throttling settings – e.g. set the list throttling settings to a low value and view the related error when attempting to add list items.
  • Configure Remote Blog Storage using the Microsoft FILESTREAM provider – ensure you test the install by viewing files stored in the RBS data store directory.
Note that at the time of writing the Microsoft FILESTREAM provider is to the best of my knowledgenot geared up for large scale implementations. I would personally recommend that in a real world scenario you evaluate third party RBS providers.

Content specific to SharePoint 2010 Service Pack 1 (SP1)

This is a list based on Microsoft’s :

Recommended reading:

  •  – not a Microsoft publication but I think reading this is important for a balanced view on RBS.

Recommended learning activities:

  • Delete and restore a site (SPWeb) using the UI
  • Delete and restore a site collection (SPSite) using PowerShell (
  • Perform a shallow copy migration using the Move-SPSite Windows PowerShell CmdLet with the -RbsProviderMapping parameter. This requires RBS to be configured on the content databases.
  • Check out the Storage Management feature (StorMan.aspx).

Please let me know if this was useful to you, especially if you have sat the 70-667 exam recently.

Ben