A Year’s Worth of MS Exam and Cert Retirements Announced

On June 17, Erika Cravens of MS Learning posted a Born to Learn blog entitled “Upcoming Exam and Certification Retirements including Windows XP MCDST!!!” You can click that link to see the whole list, but there are some interesting items therein that I’d like to point out:

• 70-403 TS: System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, Configuring
• 70-557 TS: MS Forefront Client and Server, Configuring
• 70-655 TS: Windows Vista and Server Operating Systems, Pre-Installing for OEMs
• 70-431 TS: Microsoft SQL Server 2005 – Impltementation and Maintenance
• 70-442 and 443 PRO: Advanced SQL Server 2005 exams
• MCAD and MCSD Upgrade exams for MS .NET Framework (70-552, -553, -554, -558, -559)
• 70-652 TS: Windows Server Virtualization, Configuring

Also the MSCE and MCSD on Windows 2000 Server are finally being retired, as of December 31, 2011. Eleven years ain’t bad for a Windows Server certification, and I’m sure that the number of people holding such credentials outnumbers the remaining Windows Server 2000 installations still in use (but I could always be wrong! .