Today, I took the beta exam for the upcoming Microsoft certification for Information Workers. A blog post at Born to Learn gives more details if you want to do so as well (but only until end of May, few days left!):
http://borntolearn.mslearn.net/btl/b/weblog/archive/2011/05/12/calling-all-sharepoint-aficionados-take-the-mos-beta-exam.aspx
I prepared myself by first looking at the list of topics on the official exam page:
http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/exam.aspx?ID=77-886
To track my progress, keep learning resources in location, but ultimately also to help others, I created a spreadsheet that contains links to relevant learning sites for the individual topics: 
http://www.modery.net/1_moderynet_–_share-manage-govern/resources/77-886%20Learning%20Plan.xlsx.html
(Learning Plan / Study Guide)
What helped me most, however, were my years of experience working with SharePoint, also in a “site owner” role. Most of the things that this exam covers have been done by me multiple times, if not more often (add an announcement..hah, easy points!).
When I did a last minute search before the exam today, I found another blog entry by Wes Hackett with links as well (mostly the same):
http://weshackett.com/2011/05/microsoft-office-specialist-mos-77-886-study-guide/
How did the exam go? I don’t want to share too much detailed information as I’m under a NDA, but I hope that the following points will still be useful for others:
- The format of the exam is a lot better than the format of the SharePoint 2007 exams, it is a much more realistic exam
- The best way to prepare is to go through all points in the list of topics at least once. Nothing beats hands-on experience! I could answer a lot of questions simply from relying on nearly four years of experience (mostly with 2007)
- I experienced a bug towards the end of the exam where I encountered a few questions from either the 70-667 or the 70-668 exam. I was presented with Central Admin, and had the pleasure of working with service apps and the search. I tried to answer them to my best knowledge, but as my final score in that section was lower than the others, I either answered partially wrong, or maybe the answers weren’t even counted. Of course this is something that can be expected in a beta, it surely won’t happen in the final exam
I also saw another blog post today about this exam by Marc Molenaar, he managed to get a score of 793 (mine was "only" 747, though I don’t quite know what I did wrong, except for the above mentioned bug during the exam):
http://www.information-worker.nl/2011/05/23/score-sp2010-beta-exam-77-886
Would I recommend this exam to others? In my opinion, this is a very good step by Microsoft. It allows people who are "only" managing sites to get an official certification, and the exam I took today seemed to ask the right questions (at least I would expect a site owner to be able to answer the majority of those questions). So yes, I would recommend it to others.
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