This post is cross-posted from the EMC Proven Professional Community on the EMC Community Network

Here are some of the highlights from the past week in the Proven Professional Community:

Community Refresh

We’ve been refreshing the look and feel of the community – more to come on that. What do you think so far? This week we released four new Knowledge Sharing articles. Topics range from data loss prevention recommendations, the benefits of email archiving (using EMC EmailXtender and EMC Centera), data compression and de-duplication, and what you need to know to recover a Documentum installation from a disaster recovery site.

We also have someone new in the Proven Spotlight: Mohammed Hashim from India. Go learn more about him and say maybe say hi in the comments.

Also please vote in our poll – what prompted you to get a Proven Professional certification?

How to study for an EMC Proven Professional certification exam

We’ve talked about this alot here in the community, but since some one brought this up on the Facebook Fan Page, I thought I’d talk about it a bit here in the community.

Never pay for study materials for the Proven Professional exams. The only official study materials are our training, and the practice tests. If you pay for other study materials, you will put your certification at risk. See this thread for more info.

I am actually a Proven Professional – SAN IE Specialist. I like that the exams are hard – that you really need to know about these technologies to pass the exam. You also have to study, who am I kidding!! I know when I study, it refreshes the little bits of technology that I may not touch all the time. In other words, it reinforces the hands-on experiences I’ve had in my career. I learn as I study!

Here is a great thread we had about studying. What does everyone think about this? Do you have any other study tips for folks?

Blogs of interest to Proven Professionals

• “Cloud” is a big topic with Proven Professionals – that is obvious by the number of cloud-based Knowledge Sharing articles that were submitted this year. Atmos is part of EMC’s cloud solution. Check out these posts by fellow Proven Professionals on Atmos:
  • All you wanted to know about Atmos in 7 minutes
  • How object-based storage techniques satisfy medical use cases

  Other interesting cloud posts:

  • Strategy and vision behind Atmos
  • What is a cloud, what’s a private cloud, and when would you want one?

Did I miss anything important? Let me know in the comments!

What were you up to this week?

We made it to Q3! I know many of you have a new Proven Professional certification – share your accomplishment with us in the comments! The Canadians and the Americans have holidays this week, and the world cup is still on. What are you up to?

That’s all I have for this week. Keep safe, and we’ll do it again next week!

As you may know, I work for the Education Services organization at EMC. I create technical training to support our Proven Professional certification tests (I also help write the tests).

This article explains what my organization has done to crack down on cheaters – people who purchase “test dumps” to pass the exam, and really don’t have the skills and knowledge required to pass the certification test.

Gene Radwin, who heads up our Certification exam development team, came up with a really clever way to catch people who were passing the cert tests because they bought the answers online. He developed a fingerprint that cheaters would leave behind when they answered the test questions. The article explains it this way:

Here, then, was a means to elicit a distinctive pattern for “cheaters” – add questions to an exam which were (1) easy and (2) which had the incorrect answer coded as the correct answer. Like Homer’s Trojan Horse, these mis-coded, easy questions would undermine those who tried to use them. Honest takers would be scored as answering such questions incorrectly; dishonest test takers would be scored as answering them correctly.

So basically, Gene figured out how to beat cheater at their own game! Brilliant!