New Horizons Blog and Resources

The lists below details what and when Microsoft certifications and exams are retiring and what your recommended next steps should be. 

First, if you’ve recently earned one of these certifications or have been studying for an upcoming MCSA, MCSE or MCSD exam, relax and take a deep breath, you’re OK, but you should move swiftly. In Microsoft's statement they clarified that, “If you have passed a qualifying exam, it will still count towards competency attainment for 12 months after the exam is retired.”

If you are pursuing a qualifying exam, “you can continue earning the MCSA, MCSD, and MCSE certifications as long as the required exams are still available. As we retire the exams that are part of those certification paths, you will no longer be able to earn those certifications. If you are unable to complete the required exams before they are retired (31/01/2021), ....”

New Horizons is named as one of the top 20 IT training companies on TrainingIndustry.com’s annual Top 20 IT Training Companies List. We’ve been honored with this designation for the past thirteen years in a row! Considerations for the Training Industry Top 20™ IT Training Companies List was based on the following criteria:

New Horizons Learning Group has earned the Most Improved Authorized Training Partner award at the annual Authorized Training  Partner Meeting and Award Ceremony held virtually from Rochester, NY.

Given to CertNexus Authorized Training Partners (ATP), each award recognizes the ATPs exemplary representation of CertNexus’ emerging tech training and certification programs and their outstanding achievements in doing so.

“Data is driving business and New Horizons Learning Group has recognized that the next generation of skills will be focused around data-driven technologies,” said Jeff Felice, President of CertNexus. “ Extending their training services to focus on the growing emerging tech skills gap has led to the growth of their business. ”

365 Real-Time Co-Authoring

I’m going to tell you an anecdote that I’m sure will ring true for you: you go to open a file that you desperately need to work on, but a dialog box warning pops up saying “This file is locked for editing by so-and-so, would you like to open a Read Only copy”. Naturally, you click yes because the work must be done. So you do your work and then click Save As. Now, there are 2 copies of similar files, and as time passes it becomes 3 copies, and then 4… because you and your colleagues can’t work on the same file at the same time, right?

As report writers, we often do not have the ability to change the data on the database directly; we merely have to work with the data we’ve got. For this reason, we spend much of our time trying to cosmetically “fix” the data just enough so our report can run properly.

This is especially true of Nulls.

Nulls are the absence of data – as if someone skipped that cell in the database. The tricky part is that Nulls are not equal to zero. In fact, Nulls are not equal to any value.

This is a problem because throughout other reporting practices, Nulls wreak havoc! The most common example of this havoc is if you concatenate several strings of text (essentially gluing pieces of text together into one long text), a single Null in any part of the concatenation will make the whole result Null. In this latter case, imagine concatenating first names, middle initials, and last names into one field called “full name”; not everyone has a middle initial, and if the database has Nulls in the middle initial column, then some people will get Nulls for the “full name” field. It’s like saying “just because you don’t have a middle initial, you don’t get a full name.” And that’s just not fair!