Palaestra Training just released a new training series for the Windows Server 2008 70-642 (Network Infrastructure Configuration) exam.  This MCTS exam counts as credit toward the MCITP: Server Administrator and MCITP: Enterprise Administrator certifications.

This in-depth training covers everything you’ll need to know to become proficient configuring your Windows 2008 network, as well the information necessary to pass the 70-642 exam.  The trainer, Michael Shannon, is an expert trainer who has helped thousands of students around the world get certified and improve their IT careers.

The training also comes with the award-winning MeasureUp exam prep software for the 70-642 exam.

Check them out at www.PalaestraTraining.com for more information.

Palaestra Training creates high-quality computer based training videos for Microsoft, Cisco and CompTIA technologies.

Looking for an awesome combination when it comes to IT Certification Computer Training Videos? 

Palaestra Training recently announced they’ve partnered with MeasureUp, one of the best exam prep companies in the world.

Palaestra Training now includes a full copy of MeasureUp’s award-winning exam prep software with most of their training titles.  This is great news for anyone looking to ramp up on their IT skills, including IT professionals needing to get certified. 

MeasureUp has been a long time favorite among IT professionals and was awarded Redmond Magazine’s Preferred Product award as well as being a CertCities Reader’s Choice Awards finalist. 

Accordning to a recent survey, IT professionals continue to be in high demand and this trend is likely to continue for the next decade.  So even in today’s economy, the Information Technology field is a great place to be.

For more information, visit them online at www.PalaestraTraining.com

Many companies are already chomping at the bit to take advantage of many of the features Windows Server 2008 offers, such as improvements to Terminal Services, Server Virtualization and security enhancements including bitlocker and read-only domain controllers for branch-office type installations. 

Many of the services and features included in Windows Server 2008 will be able to replace software and applications many companies pay for currently.  While this is certainly going to be a welcome addition by many IT departments, it also creates opportunities as well.

Training and certification will continue to play a big part in securing higher paying jobs, opening doors, being considered for new opportunities, changing careers, earning the promotion, etc.  Some of the Top IT Certifications for 2008 will continue to be the perennial favorites, including CompTIA A+ Certification and Cisco CCNA Certification. 

Networking and Support are Key Components

One of the most sought after certifications is Cisco’s CCNA certification.  Virtually every business, regardless of industry, needs qualified people to design, configure, troubleshoot and maintain their networks.  This isn’t going to change for 2008.  In addition, these same companies need people to troubleshoot hardware and software issues, provide desktop and desk-side support and rollout new machines; along with refreshing existing ones.  For these reasons, CompTIA A+ Certification training, and Microsoft’s MCDST Certification training will continue to be offer an excellent return on investment.  If you are looking to either get into the information technology field, or increase your current level, then A+, MCDST or CCNA certification is definitely a worthwhile endeavor.

Project Management

According to a recent Gartner survey, project management is another area that will continue to be a high-paying profession that will be in demand in 2008.  Project Managers manage the project lifecycle, from conception through design, testing and implementation.  They coordinate with the various individual contributors involved in the project, and make sure timelines, deliverables and budgets are met.  They also are able to determine when things are getting off-track and adjust accordingly to ensure timely completion of the project.

As a result, Project Management related certifications like CompTIA Project+ and the Project Management Institute’s (PMI) Project Management Professional (PMP) certifications will be in demand, along with technical certifications and training centering around enabling project management and collaboration, such as Microsoft’s SharePoint 2007.

Security

Perhaps one of the biggest areas for new growth is the security sector, just based on the fact that so many companies are now realizing the need to secure their environments.  Hacking is becoming easier to do, as new tools are released and information is quickly disseminated.  Every company has, or should have, a need to secure their environments from being compromised both physically and virtually.  Even companies that feel they don’t have anything that necessitates additional funding to secure their networks, should understand that failure to do so opens them up to not only being attacked; but also to being used as an intermediary step in a larger attack against other targets (i.e. Denial of Service attacks against remote targets).

Virtualization

As word grows of how great server virtualization can be for a company’s bottom line, not to mention how it improves adminstration, fault tolerance and reduces hardware expenditures, certifications centering around virtualization technologies will be in high demand.  The two dominant players in this field currently are VMware and Microsoft.  Of the two, VMware’s ESX Server platform is a more mature technology and can enable some organizations to consolidate 30 or more hosts onto a single ESX server.

Get Certified and Get Ahead

The bottom line is, if you want the maximize your opportunities for 2008, continue to educate yourself, broaden your skills as much as possible, and stay ahead of the curve.  By keeping a step ahead and learning the skills that companies need to maintain their businesses, you’ll keep yourself marketable and in demand.  If you’re not already certified, you should definitely be working on:

• CompTIA A+ Certification
• Microsoft MCDST Certification
• Cisco CCNA Certification

Those three certifications provide an excellent body of knowledge that forms the foundation of a successful and prosperous IT Career.  From there, you can grow in many directions and specialize in any one of a dozen or more areas.

Best of luck in your Training and Certification Endeavors!!

Palaestra Training has just released a new training series: Microsoft Outlook 2003 Training. This is an exciting series, from our new instructor, Sid Miller. Sid is an Office expert that really makes it easy to learn all of the features Outlook has to offer.

Whether your a home user or business user, chances are you’re only using a fraction of the functionality Outlook 2003 has built-in.

With this training series, you’ll be given in-depth coverage of all the features and functionality found in Outlook. It’s so much more than just an e-mail client, it’s full-featured personal productivity tool that does calendaring and scheduling, e-mail, tasks, to-do lists, journals and more.

This series is over 7 hours of in-depth coverage in a format that’s easy to understand and packed full of information that you will be able to use immediately to boost your productivity.

For free full-length samples from this series and others, or to find out more about the training visit www.palaestratraining.com

Palaestra Training’s CCNA Certification Training video on Frame Relay has gotten over 20,000 views on YouTube in just over 6 months time.

Jason Emerson, Palaestra Training’s Cisco CCNA instructor has a great conversational style, and makes learning technically advanced concepts fun.

That’s an amazing amount of interest for a technical training video, and a testament to the quality of our training. We create technically-accurate training that is both educational and highly-entertaining.

In addition to IT certification training for Microsoft, Cisco and CompTIA, Palaestra Training also created an Internet Safety training series designed for parents to help keep their children safe while online.

Several recent surveys, including the recent article by Computer World shows that demand for IT workers is growing at the highest rate in several years. 

As a result, salaries are also on the rise.  Why?  Companies need talented, motivated Information Technology professionals and many companies report difficulty in finding those people.

Additionally, as with any asset, IT infrastructure has a life-cycle that necessitates upgrading and/or replacing every 3-5 to stay current with new and emerging technologies.  For may companies, utilizing current technology is a competitive advantage.  For others, it’s a necessary evil, but either way, those companies need IT professionals who know how to install, migrate, maintain and support their infrastructure.

So what does this mean to you?  It means that if you’re already an IT professional, brush up on new skills and reassess your qualifications relative to the job market.  Are you making what your worth? According to a recent Robert Half salary survey, salaries for all IT roles will rise an average of 5.3% for 2008!

If you are thinking about changing careers and getting into IT or perhaps moving to a different area within IT, again get the training you need to take you there quickly.  Spending a year or two casually learning new skills on your own will eventually enable you to acquire those skills, but the rest of the world will have passed you by.  Staying ahead of the curve, and constantly expanding your skillset is what sets you apart from the competition.

If you’re great at hardware, consider learning networking and acquiring Cisco skills.  If you’re already proficient at networking, consider brushing up on your hardware skills, or systems administration skills.  A well-rounded IT professional that can do it all (and specialize in one or two areas) is a very attractive employee to most companies.

The great thing about IT is that it constantly changes, and there are always new technologies to master, new industries and new opportunities. It all starts with training and getting the skills to take you there.

Palaestra Training released an updated version of their best selling Cisco CCNA Certification training this week.

The updates covers the new material in the 640-802 exam, including Cisco’s Security Device Manager (SDM), Wireless Communication, Access List enhancements in Cisco’s newer IOS versions, and IPv6.

Jason Emerson, Palaestra Training’s Cisco CCNA instructor does an excellent job conveying the information you’ll need for the exam.  You’ll finish the series with a thorough understanding of how to install, configure and maintain Cisco routers and develop a solid foundation to build a networking career upon.

Jason’s CCNA videos are some of the most viewed technical training videos on YouTube!  Check out Palaestra Training’s site for yourself, and get your CCNA certification today.

Cisco CCNA Training – Frame Relay

What is the DoD 8570.1-M?  It’s part of a directive that’s part "Information Assurance Workforce Improvement Program" which mandates that every full- and part-time military service member, defense contractor, civilian and foreign employee with privileged access to a DoD system, regardless of job series or occupational specialty obtains a commercial certification credential that has been accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI).

Palaestra Training (www.palaestratraining.com) has created a CompTIA A+ certification series that will prepare personnel for CompTIA A+ Certification.  CompTIA A+ certification meets the T1 requirements of the directive.  CompTIA A+ Certification is the cornerstone of any IT career and allows a student to secure a position in a wide variety of industries.

Additionally, this certification is one of the few that allows a person a broad foundation they can use to take their careers in a number of directions. 

Advancing your career into networking, information security, systems administration, help desk, training, analysis and more are all possible as a person builds upon the skills they learned as an A+ Certified technician.  The newly updated A+ Certification exam covers the new technologies and ensures a student has exposure to the most common components, setups and technologies likely to be found in the field.

The better trained a person is, the more likely they are to follow guidelines and understand not just the "how", but also the "why" behind the way something is done.  What does this mean for the government and agencies where security is paramount?  It means a more secure, stable and standards-compliant environment.

Something a lot of people who are new to website development, and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) overlook is how effective is their website? After all, a website is a collection of individual pages, and typically we want people to move from one page to another, right?

However, often times the navigation of the site is confusing, or non-existent. There is no clear route for the visitor to go from one page to another, and no clear direction of what you want them to do (your “Call to Action”)

A great way to observe this is to use an analytics program to view your website’s “Bounce Rate”. The bounce rate is the percentage of people who come to your site, look at one page and leave without going anywhere else. It could also be people who come to your site for only a few seconds and leave. By monitoring the bounce rate, you can determine how well your pages are performing, and get an view of your site’s “ease of use”. If your bounce rates are extremely high (70%-80% or higher), chances are SOMETHING is wrong. Whether it’s navigation, call to action, visual appearance or relevance of content will of course vary from site to site.

If you haven’t used an analytics package before, Google’s analytics is a great place to start, is packed full of information and will give you just about every statistic you could want. For a great overview on how to use an analytics package to analyze your site’s bounce rate, read Avinash Kaushik’s bounce rate article. It’s a great in-depth review of bounce rate and what it all means.

There are lots of metrics and analytics programs out there, some of the more well-known ones are:

• Google Analytics
• ClickTracks
• PHPMyVisites
• Web Trends

So what’s the point of all of this? The point is analyze, analyze, analyze! You’re doing the work of putting your site or you blog out there, you add content diligently and try to add value for your viewers. Why not go the extra step and make sure what your delivering to the world is the best it can be? Maximize your efforts, learn from your mistakes and realize this is part of the fun! Learning the process and understanding why and how things work, will make you a more effective blogger, marketer or e-commerce site owner.

Happy analyzing!

When I teach class, especially to beginners or when I’m talking with parents about Internet Safety, a question I’m often asked is “How does the Internet actually work?” Well, in reality it’s obviously a complex topic, but we can certainly break it down into familiar terms. When you type in a web address, like www.palaestratraining.com, your computer actually does some work behind the scenes to translate that human readable name into an IP address. Just like if you wanted to call your friend Susy’s house, you would translate that (in your head probably) from her name into her telephone number, and you’d contact her by her telephone number.

Let’s use the concept of directory services (think of the yellow pages for your town). Let’s say there is a directory service for each city, for each state, and one master directory service for the whole country.

If I lived in New Jersey and wanted to find a pizza shop in southern California what would I do? Well, let’s pretend that I called information, or directory services, in New Jersey and asked them if they knew the number to Nick’s Pizza in Long Beach, California. After they got done laughing, they would say “No, but we do have the number to the main information office (the directory service for the whole country), check there.” So let’s continue along with this scenario and pretend there was a main directory service (yellow pages) that had all the phone numbers for all the smaller directory services (information offices) for each state in the US. I would call the big daddy of information services and ask them if they had the phone number for Nick’s Pizza in Long Beach, California. That main information office would say, “no, but the phone number for directory services in California is such and such, try there…”.

So, not being easily daunted, I would call that number and ask the same question, to which the main office for California would say, “We don’t have it either, but we do have the number for directory services in Long Beach, try there..” So I press onward. I call that information office and low and behold, since they were responsible for the numbers in that little part of the world, they would have the phone number for Nick’s Pizza. They would give me the number so I could finally get in touch with Nick’s Pizza, but since I forgot about the three hours difference in time zones, they weren’t open yet!

Seriously though, the Internet functions in very much the same way. The Internet doesn’t run of off “Directory Services” like we’re used to with the phone systems, but there is a directory services of sorts, and it is called the “Domain Name System” or DNS. DNS is made up of a top level server (the big daddy directory service in our example), and then lower level DNS servers, and so on. Each domain (i.e. palaestratraining.com or microsoft.com) has a DNS server that is responsible for the addresses within that name space. Just like directory services for Anytown, USA would have all the phone numbers for that town.

So in keeping with that example, DNS servers don’t maintain phone numbers, they keep IP addresses. The to DNS servers keep the IP addresses to lower level DNS servers and so on down the line. The DNS servers for each domain, keep the IP addresses for the servers in it’s domain.

Some of the top level domains you’re probably already familiar with , such as .com, .edu, .gov, .mil and so on. Below them are even lower level servers that handle even smaller pieces of the internet’s name space.

DNS Resolution
If we look at the graphic below, we’ll see that the following takes place for someone trying to access the website at www.palaestratraining.com:

1. The web surfer’s machine makes a request to it’s configured DNS server, asking for the IP address of the website (i.e. www.palaestratraining.com)
2. The DNS checks its cache (temporary memory of recently asked questions), realizes it doesn’t have the IP address and then makes another request on behalf of the web surfer to the “root” internet server, which is “.”
3. The “.” Root server doesn’t have the IP address of www.palaestratraining.com, but it does have the IP address of the DNS servers that are authoritative for the COM domain, and refers the requesting DNS server there.
4. The ISP’s DNS server then contacts the COM DNS server and again asks for the IP address of www.palaestratraining.com.
5. The COM DNS server advises it doesn’t have the IP address, but it does have the IP address of the DNS server authoritative for the Palaestra Training domain, and refers the requestor there.
6. The ISP’s DNS server then contacts the Palaestra Training DNS server and again asks for the IP of www.palaestratraining.com.
7. The Palaestra Training DNS server checks it’s database and provides the ISP DNS server with the IP address of www.palaestratraining which is 64.27.85.132.
8. The ISP’s DNS server returns the IP address of 64.27.85.132 to the web surfer’s machine.
9. The web surfer’s machine then makes a connection to www.palaestratraining.com, requesting web services from the server hosting the website.
10. Palaestratraining.com processes the request and sends the main page for www.palaestratraining.com which is then displayed in the web surfer’s browser

That seems like a lot of work just to get a web page! It’s even more impressive when you consider the fact that all of this usually takes place in a matter of seconds whether the web server is located across town or across the globe. As you might guess from the example above, DNS is not one giant database. It’s actually broken up into different parts, with the root of the internet at the top of the hierarchy. There are different DNS servers that handle the different portions of the internet such as .com, .net, .edu, .mil and so forth. That is really what makes DNS so fast is that a surfer can quickly be referred to a DNS server that handles the site they are looking for, otherwise it would take substantially longer (if it were even possible) to search through the more than 300 million web sites that currently exist.

So the next time you visit a website, take a moment to think about what’s actually happening behind the scenes, and thank you computer for all that hard work!