I passed the 70-681 exam a couple of weeks ago, and as I have not seen much discussion about this exam, I thought I’d share my experiences. I used the Trainsignal video titled “Windows 7 Deployment Training” as the sole source of material for my studies, combined with a virtual lab to follow along with the instructor. I set aside a few days solely to study for the exam, so I would estimate I had about 30 or so hours of dedicated preparation. I do have quite a bit of prior experience with WDS which meant I could skim through those sections of the training video, however I had never deployed Office 2010 or used System Centre Configuration Manager before, so I had to spend extra time getting familiar with that.

The exam itself consisted of 50 questions, and required a score of 700 out of 1000 to achieve a pass. The allocated time was 140 minutes, of which I used about 50. I scored 822, though I didn’t really learn the Office 2010 deployment stuff properly as I couldn’t get hold of the media to build the automation files. This meant that I couldn’t follow along with the instructor in the video for the Office 2010 stuff, and as a result I scored very poorly on the Office 2010 questions.

I would advise anybody planning to take this exam to take care to understand the imagex and dism commands and their functionality. I would also suggest that it is worth dedicating additional time to understanding the User State Management and how it relates to MDT and SCCM. Fortunately the tools and software you need to learn this are all available through legitimate means – Server 2008 R2, Windows 7, Office 2010, SQL 2008 (full version, as SCCM won’t work with Express) and SCCM 2007 can be downloaded as trials. WAIK and MDT and are free tools.