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There are several skill levels and after you master the elementary ones you can move on to the advanced ones. Given below is an outline of some of the courses available which will help you take the Windows 7 exam and eventually become a Windows 7 MCTS.

XP was the dominant operating software and a lot of folk are practiced in XP. There are XP to Windows 7 transition courses. It's got a fully revamped look and layout, quicker network stack, advanced security features and large enhancements in the network and storage area. To become a Windows 7 MCTS, you need to be acquainted with all this. However it is quite different from XP.

there were a lot of changes and improvements form XP and things work very differently here. Therefore, there are courses specially designed for XP specialists who want to shift to Windows 7. But you do not necessarily need to be an all-knowing expert in XP, any person with a fairly good knowledge of Windows can gain benefit from this course.

There are courses designed for applicant who need to take a Win 7 examination to achieve advanced certification which may enable them to employ and install at concern level. Some level of experience is needed to be able to join such a course. The preliminaries are that the applicant is well-versed and skillful when it comes to installation, configuration and network administration, managing clients and servers. Understanding of operating systems and application deployment and familiarity with System Center suite and Windows Server will be terribly beneficial.

And of course, there is one very important aspect you should focus on when preparing for a Microsoft Exam – support and troubleshooting. This require the specialist to be very comfortable and familiar with the application and MCSE 2003 Certification are designed that will help the specialist identify commonly encountered problems and apply industry best practices to solve them.

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Now, on a surface level this might seem intuitive considering how many apps are available on the two platforms. But the figures show that the top two operating systems account for a bigger chunk of app downloads than their relative footprint would logically suggest. Competitors also have apps, but these two are the leading destinations for people who are eager for mobile software.

That shows why it’s hard to break into the top of the smartphone market, which is dominated by what the New York Times‘ David Pogue calls “app phones.” It’s not enough to have elegant hardware, you have to bring a very vibrant and broad app market to consumers, too. That’s partly why iOS and Android are sitting pretty: they offer a lot of very compelling apps that make money for developers, more so on iOS but increasingly so on Android.

For competitors like BlackBerry or Windows Phone 7 to compete, they need to really bring the app heat as well. Both are working hard on doing so, but it’s hard to close the distance when iOS and Android have such a lead. And that lead also benefits Google and Apple through app lock-in, in which consumers may be reluctant to leave a platform because they have a lot of apps and data tied into one operating system. Getting someone to switch to a new platform requires a big commitment from a user, who has to know that the apps they want will be waiting for them on a new platform and that the transition, which may involve losing data, will be worth it.

Of course, the app market and the growth of the platforms are somewhat intertwined. Developers like to place their bets on the biggest and most profitable platforms and a big library of apps can help sell a platform. For someone who’s starting behind on apps, or whose device sales are fading or sluggish, it’s tough to break that cycle after it’s well under way. I think Windows Phone 7 probably has the best shot at escaping the downward spiral and gaining some momentum, but looking at the competition through the lens of the app advantage, I think it will be a harder road for Microsoft then the rosy projections painted by Gartner and IDC, who predict WP7 displacing iOS by 2015 as the chief rival to Android. The app ecosystem is a key factor to achieving that uptake.

Nokia chief Stephen Elop said as much when he announced that the move to Windows Phone 7 for Nokia smartphones was led by the need to compete on ecosystems. But I think it’s tough to keep building that ecosystem when you’re not selling that many phones. Nokia’s introduction of new phones will certainly help, but consumers are still going to see more apps on Android and iOS. And developers are going to need to see a lot more momentum before they really support WP7. There is hope for WP7, based on a recent Appcelerator/IDC developer survey, which found that WP7 was pulling away from BlackBerry as the third most popular smartphone option for developers. But WP7 will also have to vie for developer attention with the Kindle Fire, which is now the top Android tablet in the minds of Appcelerator developers.

I still hope that we’ll see more than just a two-horse race in smartphones. And it’s certainly possible we will see WP7 and BlackBerry rise to the challenge. But they’re going to have to offer competitive app marketplaces for consumers and developers. The emergence of HTML5 web apps might offset some of the existing advantage, but even if it does, it will likely take a while to really get going. For now, Android and iOS, with their app advantage, are enjoying the view from the top, without much fear of tumbling from their perch.

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Anyone following VMware is likely familiar with the mobile virtualization plans it laid out at its VMworld event last month. Essentially, the company wants to enable the consumerization trend by virtualizing mobile devices like its technology already does for servers and desktops, and then delivering applications designed to run natively on these new form factors such as tablets and smartphones. This effort falls under the product banner of Horizon Mobile, which Herrod describes at a high level as providing a dual persona for devices — one for personal use and one for corporate use.

A key component of VMware’s strategy is its partnership arrangement with both Samsung and LG to incorporate the hypervisor into the versions of the Android operating system that they’ve developed to run on their handsets. When the partnerships finally bear fruit, all of the manfacturers’ Android devices will come with this feature, meaning that an employee just needs to show to work with his device and let IT get the enterprise-centric virtual machine up and running. But, Herrod said today, VMware is also working with Google to get its virtualization hooks incorporated into the core Android that Google puts out and that manufacturers like Samsung, LG and others modify for their specific devices.

That could be a huge deal for VMware, as Android devices account for almost 50 percent of all devices, according to recent estimates. Getting its technology incorporated into the Android OS coming straight from Google would make VMware the de facto mobile virtualization option, and would save it the hassle of having to neccesarily strike deals with every single device maker. It’s difficult to gauge how many mobile devices VMware might find itself on compared with the number of servers it virtualizes in data centers, but Herrod himself provided some insight into the potential: he said he access five devices per day and had three on his person at the event.

The elephant in the room, though, is Apple’s iOS, which probably represents the most disruptive force in the consumerization of IT thanks to its presence on iPads and iPhones. VMware certainly could virtualize iOS devices, Herrod said, but one can imagine that Apple isn’t too keen on the idea of having Android apps running on its devices. Technologically, there aren’t many hurdles, but business issues still can jam the works. VMware isn’t about to lose out on the power of iOS altogether, though. Today, for example, it rolled out versions of its SlideRocket and Socialcast applications designed for iPads.

The result of all the technological wrangling, Herrod explained, is a litany of options around how users might go about managing their split-personality devices. You’ll have to watch a replay of Herrod’s discussion to get the whole story, but Herrod made it sound like the possibilities are almost endless in terms of intelligently separating business use from personal use.

Interestingly, Cisco’s Tom Gillis noted in an earlier Mobilize session that putting a hypervisor on the phone isn’t an ideal solution to consumerization security because it will result in too high a performance hit. VMware has claimed its technology minimally affects performance, and even that is mitigated to some degree by running apps specially designed to run in that environment.

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On its most recent quarterly investor call just last week, RIM reported shipping a scant 200,000 PlayBook tablets. In the prior quarter, the first one that included PlayBook shipments, the company shipped 500,000 units. Bear in mind that shipped doesn’t mean sold and the company hasn’t yet said how many tablets have actually been sold. Regardless, there’s a few problems here.

In a fast growing tablet market, PlayBook shipments should be growing, not shrinking. DigiTimes sources indicate that RIM expected to build and ship between 4 and 5 million PlayBooks in 2011, but it’s clear that the actual figure will be a small percentage of that number. And QNX, RIM’s future operating system for phones, is the featured platform for the tablet; if it fails to impress or doesn’t sell devices, the company is at risk for losing momentum before it ever gets QNX on BlackBerry handsets.

When RIM cut 2,000 jobs back in July, I noted that the company was taking too long to transition from its legacy BlackBerry OS to the more modern QNX platform. At the time, I said:

The entire situation reemphasizes that RIM has been too slow to change in a market that’s moving fast. The BlackBerry Storm, an attempt at an all-touchscreen device, was met with fanfare in 2008, but it never materialized as a solid competitor to Apple’s iPhone. Last year’s BlackBerry Torch was more evolution than revolution.

And the company’s plan to run future phones on a QNX-powered platform makes sense, but RIM bought QNX in April of 2010 and there are still no handsets announced for the new operating system. Instead, new Bold handsets are the latest offerings announced; they appear delayed and will run a new version of BlackBerry OS, not QNX. They’re also not expected to be upgradable to QNX either.

QNX runs great on the PlayBook and I actually enjoy using it. What the PlayBook can do, it does very well; the bigger problem is what it can’t do. Although there’s a software update expected next month to address some of these problems, the device still has no standalone, native email application and doesn’t yet run the promised Android apps that will help offset a relative lack of third-party software.

In hindsight, RIM should have focused its QNX efforts on handsets before trying to compete in the tablet market.  Early this year, RIM suggested that QNX is best suited for dual-core chips, but given that the QNX-powered Colt handset is expected to use a single-core chip, that justification to push tablets first now seems weak at best.

As it stands today, it appears that the company tried to jump in to tablets first in order to leverage the market’s fast growth. But as Google Android Honeycomb tablets have illustrated, you can’t simply show up for the race and expect to win. It takes a full-featured solution, a broad ecosystem, and smart marketing to gain sales. And as much as the tablet market is growing, it is still dwarfed by smartphone sales.

RIM would have gained more bang for the buck if QNX was first put on its smartphones. Instead, it appears that the first run of the PlayBook is a relatively lost cause for the company and it will have to hope that software updates are enough to have consumers take a second look at RIM’s first tablet.

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Less than 24 hours after it went live on Microsoft’s site, Steve Ballmer reported a whopping 500,000 downloads of Windows 8 Developer Preview. That’s half a million copies, if not eager Windows fans. Well, you can count us among them. Although we were treated to some private hands-on time with a tablet optimized for the OS, we hadn’t, until now, had a chance to use it on a laptop — i.e., the computing environment where we spend most of our time, and the one where we’re most used to seeing Windows, in particular.

For the past three days, we’ve been doing just that: getting acquainted with Windows 8 using the good ‘ol mouse-and-keyboard combo. And while that might read like a redundant statement (what recent version of Windows hasn’t accommodated a cursor?), Win 8 is a peculiar breed — It’s the first version of the operating system where finger input wasn’t an afterthought, but a first-class citizen. It’s clear that this time around, Windows is optimized for touch, but we had to wonder if that Windows Phone-inspired UI would present a steep learning curve, if it would get in the way while we tried to go about business as usual. So how’s that working out for us? Suffice to say, we’re not in Kansas anymore, so find your most comfortable chair and meet us after the break — we’ve got oh-so many details to delve into.

Continue reading Windows 8 on a laptop in-depth preview (video)

Windows 8 on a laptop in-depth preview (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 16 Sep 2011 17:45:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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