Changes to Exam Requirements

Kowa

News for all NAV, GP and SL Partners:
Changes to Microsoft Dynamics Exam Requirements
In a nutshell: gone.

geordie

What is briefly the news? I don't have a PartnerSource account :oops:

Kowa

Since the article is not marked as confidential:

Effective August 13, 2014, Microsoft is announcing the elimination of ​certification/exam requirements for Microsoft Dynamics GP, Microsoft Dynamics NAV, Microsoft Dynamics SL, Microsoft Dynamics RMS and Microsoft Dynamics C5. This includes pre-sales and sales assessments as well as implementation methodology and technical certifications and covers both SPA and MPN.

jglathe

Yes. I want my money back.

jglathe

Yes. I want my money back.

JDVyska

I remain surprised at how little chatter on this topic there is. My jaw dropped at the changes, unless I'm missing something obvious.

jglathe

The lack of chatter tells me something: Partners have bigger issues than this (like, selling NAV, something, anything to survive). We had to do the exams to qualify for the SPLA (?), otherwise we would have lost our NAV partner status. To have some safety margin I did all of the exams, including the SQL one. All of them are no longer required 6 weeks after the deadline. Great. The exams itself are... of low quality, to be frank. There are some horrendous questions among them, where you can seriously question the mindset of the examiner. Most of these questions have nothing to do with NAV consulting and/or provisioning and/or development in the real world. The SQL questions were far tougher, and, although also aligned on the new features of SQL Server 2012, more based in reality. So, come to think of it, axing useless certificates is not a bad thing. Replacing them with actually useful requirements would be better.
But Microsoft decided to axe practically all requirements for selling NAV. And then this fixation on "how do I" videos. What happened to actual documentation and training courses? A "how do I" video gets you (probably) up to speed with something that has unnecessarily changed. Or so. It also gives you the "now you're an expert" impression when you solved ONE thing without knowing what's behind it. And worse, your PHB will think the same. In the field, "how do I" videos are practically useless. And I wouldn't be caught dead watching one at a customer site. This doesn't replace good documentation and real experience. All of which takes time and energy to create and build.

with best regards

Jens

JDVyska

I was pretty astonished, when looking at updating to 2013 certs, at the lack of any Application Knowledge. Trade, Manufacturing, Warehousing... all just tests about SQL statement impacts, group policy nonsense and powershell. Valuable, but not the only area of expertise.

A great product whose owner continues to baffle me. The eschewing of documentation for videos... I am equally concerned.

tinoruijs

Quite surprising. Do not yet know what to think about it.

Miklos_Hollender

jglathe wrote:

The lack of chatter tells me something: Partners have bigger issues than this (like, selling NAV, something, anything to survive).

Hm, maybe I made the right choice going to the customer side in 2011. Is the market bad now? Why? I thought partners are selling upgrades hand over fist becasue everybody is as scared that Classic can't run on Win 9 or 10 or whatever, or will not receive legislatory updates, or will be stuck in some similar sudden trap when it is too late as I am.

But even axing certification sounds a lot like "please anyone come and sell it, there are not enough sales".

I have no idea where we are going. Exactly 10 years ago I was thinking "no way this product could ever be kicked out from the EU SMB market by a competitor, it is so entrenched and trusted". Todays, I have no idea, essentially if 10 experienced guys would take over the ERP section of odoo.com and somehow a well known brand name could be put on it, like, Google, I would not bet against it at all.

jglathe

Miklos Hollender wrote:

Todays, I have no idea, essentially if 10 experienced guys would take over the ERP section of odoo.com and somehow a well known brand name could be put on it, like, Google, I would not bet against it at all.

Not sure about that. I had a few looks on this and I was repelled by the course it has taken. For me, no web-client only ERP. I can't stand it. And why would anybody throw away the little bit of performance they have for a web client only infrastructure, with all its shortcomings? Just to be able to do things on any device - which doesn't work in practice, as my experience of the last 2 decades is? What you get is lots of latency, security issues, lots of compatibiliity issues, "per device (class)" code, and so on. This would be (it actually is) my biggest issue with it.

with best regards

Jens