Before the verification exam becomes available to the public, I need ONE OR TWO people to be the first through the complete program. This is not a “beta;” the exam is finalized and you will have to pay for your verification. The first one or two people will be semi-automated as I nail down the final payment integration bits, and then we’ll throw it open to the public. If you’re interested, contact me at don at Concentrated Tech.com. First come, first served.
NOTE: As of 4th February, we’re full up for the beta. Check back later this year for the program launch.
I’m ready to begin a formal beta test of the new VERIFIED EFFECTIVEâ„¢ examination program, which we’d previously referred to as “PowerShell Verified.”
Participation in the beta will be free, and if you pass it “counts.” If you’re interested, please download the Program Guide before February 10th, 2013.
You must agree to perform you examination on February 11th or 12th
. Complete the Program License Agreement found in the Guide, and return it, with photo ID, as indicated. Be sure to indicate either Feb 11th or 12th as your desired exam date. Materials will be sent to you via e-mail, and you will have 24 hours to complete the assignment. A qualified candidate should need no more than 4-5 hours. We’ve posted a complete set of information about the program in general and the PowerShell exam in particular. At this time, I can only accept participants who are USA residents (more on that below). International expansion will happen when the program formally launches later this year. I will only be accepting 2-3 beta participants. If you submit your Program License Agreement but don’t hear back the same day, then you weren’t selected for participation. The final examination will be $150, and will be a human-graded assignment not a machine-graded exam. A certificate for passing scores will be delivered electronically, and you may order a physical certificate for a nominal fee. The first exam will be PowerShell 3.0 Toolmaking. You should be able to pass if you know how to write advanced functions, including dealing with pipeline input, ShouldProcess support, and parameter attributes and validation. You will also need to know how to create custom formatting views and type extensions, and how to create script and manifest modules. You will need to be familiar with Windows PowerShell remoting and remoting configuration, and know how to create custom remoting endpoints (session configurations) having a specified configuration. You also need to know how to write proxy functions. You should know how to connect to SQL Server databases from within PowerShell, and how to issue queries to retrieve and manipulate database data. Note that not all of these topics may be included on every examination, but you should be prepared to perform all of them. I look forward to hearing from you!
As I write this, we’re down to one ticket for the PowerShell Summit North America 2013. So what do you do if you really wanted to go, but miss that last, golden ticket?
Cry a Little
Let’s face it, this was totally avoidable. It’s probably your boss’ fault for not approving the expense, and so some subtle retribution may be in order. Burn the coffee for a week. Reboot domain controllers randomly. You know, just sulk.
A long time ago… about a year, in fact… Jason Helmick and I started talking about a community-owned PowerShell “certification.” It went nowhere. Well, not very far. Some background on exams: Microsoft, in my opinion, will never do a PowerShell cert. I say this having been part owner of a company that did outsourced exam development for the company. The deal is that Microsoft tries to certify _job tasks, _not _tools. _Nobody (well, maybe me) wakes up thinking, “gonna do me some PowerShell today.” No, PowerShell is the means to an end: “gonna automate me some user creation today” is more likely. And Microsoft tries to certify that end. PowerShell’s an important tool, and it already shows up on certification exams here and there. For the most part, I agree with Microsoft’s reasoning, there. The argument can be summarized as saying “bosses don’t hire IT pros based on their ability to operate a low-level tool, they hire them to perform job tasks, which encompasses the tool.” Except that, in the case of PowerShell, I think it’d be tremendously useful for an employer to use PowerShell expertise as a discriminating factor in hiring. I mean, “someone who can automate stuff” is more valuable than “someone who can only do stuff manually,” in any situation. So “PowerShell Verified” was intended to be a way for someone to prove - at least to themselves - that they’ve taken their PowerShell skills _to the minimum level necessary to be an effective automator. _Not a guru. Not an expert. Not Poshoholic. _Minimally effective, _who could then grow from there with experience. So that’s what I’m going to put together. I want to explain why I’m not using the word “Certification,” though. In my mind, certifications come from, mainly, first-parties like Microsoft. Microsoft has to jump through a lot of hoops to make sure their exam content is accurate, legally defensible, blah blah blah. They worry about security, brain dumps, and other stuff that diminishes the value of the certification. I don’t have that kind of bandwidth or their resources, so in many ways my little program will be less effective than a “real” certification. Plus, few bosses will give a rat’s patooty what that Don Jones guy said about your skillz (I can’t even convince bosses to buy you guys 12-core 64GB workstations for your desk). So my “Verified” program is going to be _low stakes, _meaning you take it to prove something to _
yourself
_. Here’s how this is going to go.
What’s the average tech conference cost these days? $1500? $2000? And that’s just to get in, to say nothing of hotel, air, food, and whatnot. The PowerShell Summit North America 2013 has an idea. Lets do a community-owned event, with a goal of breaking even and supporting an annual event, but not worry about a profit. Lets say you live in the US. A ticket to Seattle in April will run you $500-700 after taxes. Maybe less if you can get on a discount carrier like Southwest - they fly to SEA. Hotel will run you under $450 for three nights. Say you decide to splurge on a car for four days, probably for under $200 (including all the ridiculous taxes on rental cars). Toss in another $250 for food? That takes you to under $1600. PowerShell Summit only costs $550 - less if you register during one of the Early Bird tiers; as low us $450, in fact. That’s $2100-2200 total, or just a bit over what some conferences charge for their registration fee alone! What about quality? Well, you’ll get the same food Microsoft employees get. So that can’t be all bad. You’ll attend sessions delivered by Microsoft product team members, along with independent experts. You’ll interact directly with PowerShell team managers, too, in a small-event format that lets you provide product feedback directly to them. Heck, with under 100 fellow attendees, you’ll get plenty of face time with everyone. It’s going to be a great event, and it will definitely be affordable. It’s being run by members of the community, not a conference company. This will hopefully become OUR event, an annual gathering of PowerShell enthusiasts, experts, and team members. A chance to network, to learn, to share, and to grow. I hope you’ll be able to join us!
When Kirk Munro and I set this site up, and started redirecting traffic from the old PowerShellCommunity.org, one of our main goals was to make this a truly community-owned resource. We wanted it hosted independently (my company, Concentrated Tech, is being paid to host the site, so we get pretty good service and total control). We didn’t want to be beholden to anyone’s commercial interests or whims (companies do get distracted by their real jobs from time to time, after all). When we started talking to Microsoft about holding a PowerShell Summit, we wanted that to be community-owned too, and not tied to a commercial interest - in part so that we could keep the price low, but also so that Microsoft would be able to support us without getting into any possible conflicts of interest with any of its ISV partners. Today, our intention becomes legally realized. PowerShell.org., Inc., a Nevada corporation, is born - and we’re offering ownership shares to help raise capital. This capital will be used to pay for necessities like bookkeeping, and also to help bootstrap the Summit event. Shareholders are _legal owners of the corporation, _and will vote for its Board of Directors - who in turn appoint the Officers that make things happen. Our first Board will consist of myself, Kirk, Jeffery Hicks, Richard Siddaway, and Jason Helmick. **Want to become a community owner? **You’ll want to start with our “Shareholder Brochure,” which is available in the new “PowerShell.org, Inc.” forum on this site. That forum will also get you our Bylaws and Articles of Incorporation; the Brochure will outline the purpose of the corporation, and explain what it means to be a shareholder. The forum also contains the Share Purchase Order form, which you can use to purchase shares, and contains documents that outline our initial Board of Directors and Officer lineup and other important details.
That’s right, for just $400 you can guarantee yourself a seat at the PowerShell Summit North America 2013, to be held at Microsoft’s campus in Redmond, WA. Just 10 tickets will be made available at this low-low-low price, which is $150 off the normal registration rate. Why so low? Why are they called “I’m Feeling Lucky” tickets? Because while we’re committed to an April 2013 date, we haven’t actually locked in dates with Microsoft, yet. So to purchase these, you’ve got to be feeling flexible… or lucky! But it’s not a marriage. The tickets are completely refundable, up to 30 days prior to the event. So if we manage to lock in the three dates you can’t attend, we’ll give you your money back. You can also transfer the ticket to someone else, at any time (although they’ll be paying you directly for the ticket, and we won’t get involved in that transaction). Once these sell out, or we lock in our dates, we’ll commence the Early Bird period, with a rate of $475 and just 30 tickets available. That rate will be good through the end of December, unless we sell out. Full rate of $550 kicks in after that, when we’ll sell the remaining tickets to fill our roughly 100-person venue. Thinking about presenting? Start submitting topics in the Forums! You can get all the other juicy details on the Summit’s dedicated site, and catch the Summit’s Twitter feed for ongoing announcements.
We’re looking for a few good PowerShell contributors! You don’t need to be a PowerShell expert in order to make a valuable contribution to this community - there are a number of ways in which you can help.
Welcome to the new community! This site represents an evolution of the old PowerShellCommunity.org (also accessible at PoshComm.org). We’ve moved the site off of the old DotNetNuke software, and are now using a combination of WordPress (for community-hosted blogs) and Vanilla 2 (for the forums and for blog comments). Why the new site? A couple of reasons. For one, we desperately wanted to get out of the DotNetNuke software, which has proven somewhat difficult to work with since none of us are experts with it. We also needed to get the site out of it’s home in a Quest datacenter. Quest was awesome for providing that hosting, but they’re moving on to bigger and better things, and we wanted to get a bit more control over the site. We also wanted to trim the site down a bit, to focus mainly on providing a blogging platform and aggregation point, and the all-important Q&A forums that folks rely on.
