Course 20703-1A: Administering System Center Configuration Manager

This week I delivered at MBL Computers – ComputerLand training center in Bucharest the course 20703-1A: Administering System Center Configuration Manager. This 5-day course is covering on System Center Configuration Manager 2016, was released in July 2017 and is the replacement for the courses 10747 and 20696 which were discussing System Center Configuration Manager 2012.

Course 20703-1A is a pure administration course for an on premise only deployment of System Center Configuration Manager 2016 . It covers infrastructure configuration, discovery, client deployment, hardware and software inventory, Asset Intelligence, reporting, content distribution, application management and deployment, software updates management, Endpoint Protection, compliance settings, operating system deployment, support and operations tasks. From this perspective, course 20703-1A is targeted as Systems Administrators that need to manage an on premise System Center Configuration Manager 2016.

In the past I delivered courses for Systems Management Server 2003 (courses 2596 and 2597), System Center Configuration Manager 2007 (course 6451), System Center Configuration Manager 2012 (courses 10747, 10748 and 20696) and I must say I am very happy with 20703-1A. This course has very good content, lot of technical details and strong hands-on labs. It was a pleasure to deliver it.

Unlike 20696, course 20703-1A does not cover Intune, EMS and Cloud Services. Microsoft Learning took the decision to create another 3-day course, 20703-2A: Integrating MDM and Cloud Services with System Center Configuration Manager. This course is focusing on Mobile Device Management, Internet Based Client Management, managing Microsoft Store for Business and Office 365 applications, hybrid MDM with Configuration Management and Intune as well as on premise MDM for Windows 10.

Microsoft recently released, on 8 March 2018, the Beta Exam 70-703: Administering Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager and Cloud Services Integration. The exam topics include both on premise deployment of System Center Configuration Manager 2016, as well as Microsoft Intune and Cloud Services. Both courses 20703-1A  and 20703-2A are recommended in preparation for this exam.

I took the exam 70-703 in beta. I would say it is a fair exam, no tricky questions, a lot of scenarios. As one would expect from reading the exam objectives, about 25-30% of questions are related to cloud features.

Looking forward for the next delivery!