MCSE Core Required Exams in a Nutshell: The required 70: 290, 291, 293 and 294 Exams (In a Nutshell (OReilly))

This chapter provides a study guide for Exam 70-294: Planning, Implementing, and Maintaining a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Active Directory Infrastructure. Sections within the chapter are organized according to the exam objective they cover. Each section identifies the related exam objective, provides an overview of why the objective is important, and then discusses the key details you should know about the objective to both succeed on the test and master the objective in the real world.

The major topics covered on Exam 70-294 are:

Planning and Implementing an Active Directory Infrastructure

Designed to test your knowledge of designing Active Directory forests, domains, and sites. Also covers placement of global catalog servers and flexible operations master roles.

Managing and Maintaining an Active Directory Infrastructure

Designed to test your knowledge of managing and maintaining existing Active Directory forests, domains, and sites. Also covers restoring Active Directory.

Planning and Implementing User, Computer, and Group Strategies

Designed to test your knowledge of planning security groups, user authentication, and organizational units. Also covers creating organizational units.

Planning and Implementing Group Policy

Designed to test your knowledge of using Group Policy to configure user and computer environments. Also covers the automation features of Group Policy.

Managing and Maintaining Group Policy

Designed to test your knowledge of troubleshooting Group Policy and using Resultant Set of Policy (RSoP). Also covers maintaining installed software using Group Policy.

The sections of this chapter are designed to reinforce your knowledge of these topics. Ideally, you will review this chapter as thoroughly as you would your course notes in preparation for a college professor's final exam. That means multiple readings of the chapter, committing to memory key concepts, and performing any necessary outside readings if there are topics you have difficulty with.

As part of your preparation, I recommend creating a test environment that creates a forest root domain and a child domain with four servers running Windows Server 2003. In the forest root domain, install two domain controllers to handle the forest and parent domain roles. In a child domain, install two domain controllers to handle child domain roles. This configuration should help ensure that you can practice all the management and maintenance tasks measured by the exam.

If you are unable to use four systems for testing, you can use two separate configurations of two systems for preparation. In the first configuration, you should install a forest root domain controller and a domain controller in a child domain. In the second configuration, you should install two domain controllers in the same domain.