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I have my magnetic MCP badge stuck to my computer (perfectly safe) at work and I love it.
There was some talk of adding/changing benefits. That's what I want to hear about.
I can't make calculations for you. It is not my job and I don't know details. But you can make calculations quite easily. Of course to be really sure you need deeper study.
Just for remind:
1 kg of plastic emits about 6kg of CO2
1kWh (in USA) emits about 0.5kg of CO2.
From 1kg of plastic you can make a lot of wallet cards.
Anyway carbon footprint of all MCPs "benefits" is nothing compared to pollution done by your cars. Think about scale.
For each (US-) gallon of gasoline fuel consumed, 8.7 kg carbon dioxide (CO2) is emitted. ( http://timeforchange.org/what-is-a-carbon-footp... )
When you start your Excel to do homework think about another computation: "How much MS income is generated thanks to/per one happy MCP".
What about all the 'Charter' people - the ones who put heaps of time in working with beta and RC product, studying material (or lack of) on products that are new... these people (like me) sit the beta exams and achieve 'Charter' certifications. I notice on the new digital certificate site that this is totally unrecognised.
Any explanation, or did this one just slip through the corporatisation process.
ps: doesn't the exam cost cover the cost of posting these certificates? Perhaps not shipping international certificates via DHL might help! LOL
Well, I give up. I must start to accept the fact that these benefits will be removed and replaced by the digital versions. Whatever I agree or not.
I was thinking that, maybe, keeping the two methods would show the "adding" in MCP program.
For example, I heard that MCT now has access to Subscriptions. This is a great adding. Nothing was removed; just added.
It's made me really sad, since it will be hard to explain to others this new behavior of MCP program.
Indeed, who am I and my opinion, in front of this nonrollback decision. We're blaming about a decision that's already taken.
At least, heard the other problems, such as the Charter.
The idea of a digital card is nice and wouldnt mind checking out the pilot for that.
Is it possible to offer the old kit at a cost(I thought i remembered reading that) but I could have been mistaken
I would be interested in testing and piloting these with you guys.
otherwise i think its a realy good idea!!
hoops
Just because it doesnt agree with the way that you view these digital assets, does not mean that people are here to "bash it".
My personal feedback, for example was very literal. If we are investing ina digitial wallet card, it cannot look cheesy (as it would if you used one of the graphics posted in a blog post a few days ago).
But id like to propose that you worry less about defending the moves and more about saying hey-yeah, i can see that concern, here is how we are addressing it.
Concerned about it being cheesy, rather than being defensive, explaining why other peoples point of view is "wrong", and telling people not to "bash it", maybe a better approach here is to say "we definitely dont want that to be the case, in fact to make sure people can personalize the card, we will have several designs available which range from a highly professional corporate design to something where icons similar to earlier threads can be added".
I'm interested in helping to test out the new digital wallet cards and certificates!
- Dave P.
I love constructive feedback, and my intention here is to clarify, not defend (I just re-read the post and don't think I came across as defensive, but I realize that it can be tough to judge tone and intent in on-line communications). If I appeared in any way unreceptive to your (collective) feedback (with the exception of the paper-is-more-authentic-than-bits argument), I certainly apologize as it was not my intent.
My "bash it" comment was intended to convey "let's wait until we see the cards before jumping to conclusions about how professional they'll look and useful they'll be."
If you tried to re-order a charter certificate last month, you wouldn't have been able to either--you'd just get a "regular" certificate. The digital certs work the same way.
(We actually don't even keep a record of charter memmbers--there's no way to my knowledge that we could verify a claim. It's just the first 500 (or whatever the number is for a given credential) certificates awarded shipped)
So, having a Digital professional looking ID that serves as a proxy to it, even better!
And although I do proudly have my wallet ID with me all the time(don't like the new ones, though), I really just takes me nowhere :-P
I also a have a few charter certs, as I do a lot of beta exams, but I never saw them as anything but an early achiver tag (remember those? I have a couple of them around too :-D)
That said, I'm obvious interessed in beta testing the new digi IDs, please.
Now to the green effect: there really are a lot more options to Microsoft reduce it's carbon footprint! Really.
This one is not one I think will be significant.
But it's another step in the right direction and at the very least, a good away to keep the collective us remimded that that's something we all should be doing in every possible way.
Now for the teaser:this move does save a few bucks! How about showing us the love and tell us how this money is going to be redirected to MCP benefits :-)?
After all, you do just what to be a more green company, right?
Sure hope that's not just dollar green :-D
1) You are discontinuing old benefits before introducing new one.
2) You haven't done any beta testing in MCP community so far (or at least you haven't told about such beta tests).
3) You haven't done any surveys about new Wallet Card (because there is no beta program) but you believe most of us will like it.
4) You only believe that this is greener solution and after few days you haven't prove it. Why is that? Are you going to show us numbers. Have you done any study about that?
5) Even if those numbers would show us this is more green solution I would like to see numbers how much plastic is used in Vista/7 Box. I believe it is about 20 times more than in MCP wallet card! There are more Vista customers than MCPs.
6) Are you going to stop selling non green products from MCPStore? Some of those goods contain much much more plastic than those wallets card that I won't be able to order for money. I would like be able to pay for wallet card in the same way I can pay for MCP Speaker Vase.
I would like to take part in the beta process of the Digital wallet card.
For my self I think the digital certificates are a good idea and now that they are here I cannot imagine how come it took so long to get certs in digital format. Don't get me wrong I also love my paper certs and in the future I wouldn't be against the idea of paying to get my certs in paper format too. I also find greater value in the transcript then the paper certs for interviews. I think the transcripts could also be improved like making them like university transcript with a validation number thus enabling a interviewers to validate the transcripts online, maybe this could be done by merging the transcripts with the transcrip sharing tool instead of keeping them separate.
Regards
Shivam
To some IT Pros who work hard at a certification, they wat to get SOMETHING physical to show for it.
As a trainer, I was rather embarrassed yesterday when a student asked me if he gets a certificate that he can hang on his wall and I told him he could go to the website and print it out.
You say nobody shows their card, that is NOT true. They may not show it at interviews, but they do carry it in their wallets. It is VERY handy and it's fun to compare.
Is it eco friendly to get rid of it? I'm sure it probably is. Just like it's eco friendly to get rid of slinky's, Rubix Cubes, Balloons and Pop Tarts.
I think by taking away the Physical prize at the end, you have somewhat removed the "Carrot" from the game....
Just sayin'
Suggestions apart I would like to comment on some of the comments.. going green doesnot necessarily mean reducing the consumption of plastic or paper. The physical certificated need to be transported from one place to another, that takes fuel. If it is an international shipping then airline fuel. If you scale it to number of certificates that need to shipped this will be a significant.
I just hope that the MS Learning doesnot disappoint us by giving something short of a world class one-of-a-kind digital experience of the wallet cards
Tammie King: You are right. I think wallet cards are cool and work as great tool for promoting MS and MCP program that you can always carry. It is amazing that people from MS don't see it. Shame I won't be able to order it even for money. Wallet Cards environment footprint is bad joke, there must be something else behind the scene.
If realy want "Going Green" think carefully before you............!
I have ended my first exam(70-536) two days before.
I can't believe that i won't get a wallet card.
I think the main reason for all of this is not because of enviroment, but becouse of economy reasons. If the main reason will be in enviroment, there will be no futher fee for those, who would like to get printed certificates as today.
That's why I would like to see some compensations. The fee is the same as previous term (and still quite high in some country) and there is quite nothing they can get from MS as benefit.
Ken Rosen, in your follow up you state:
"On a deeply personal level, ...I do certainly realize why you’re irked, but hey, whatever saves the environment is fine by me."
I am glad it is fine by you. Unfortunately you are not really the customer for your certification products, are you? You are a spokesman for the company working to lower the cost of the program by ending lapel pins, certificates, wallet cards and anything physical associated with what used to be an important milestone for I.T. professionals...regardless of the effect on the actual value of the certification. It sounds as if going green is an attempt to ease Microsoft's conscience at what has happened to the 'MCSE' certification process as a whole – or maybe just change the focus of the criticism from the disappearing intangible benefits to the disappearing tangible benefits.
Remember, if Microsoft had not made several dozen lame 'mcts' certifications in an effort to boost certification revenue, the number of physical certificates mailed out would be an order of magnitude less. Should your slogan be 'back to being green' by taking all the worthless paper certificates away?
You also mention that these blogs may just be the disgruntled voicing their opinions:
"One thing I’ll caution: don’t assume that a string of negative comments on the blog constitutes a bad reception. With over 2 million MCPs out there, any change make is likely to upset some percentage of the community"
Sorry, but the community and industry have taken note:
http://gocertify.com/article/microsoft-certific...
The article title is "Is Microsoft Certification Becoming Worthless?"
(I'll give you hint - the piece goes through a myriad of reasons why the answer is "yes" and that is back when you even got a lapel pin and real wallet card)
Instead of focusing on going green, should you not spend the effort on fixing a broken and failed certification system? Taking away the certificates and telling us to thank you for our new 'digital wallet cards' may actually be doing us a favor - Microsoft's current certification game is embarrassing and who wants to humiliate themselves further with a worthless certificate up on their wall showing that they played?
And we should've had 3-6 months notice before the implementation date of this benefits reduction, to give more people time to finish up their in-progress certifications with the benefits they'd been expecting when they started, instead of springing it on us like this.
The earlier version of the digital certificate downloads produced PDF files which were perfectly compatible/viewable with Acrobat 6!! But not anymore!
Now the new version of the cert downloads produces files which are only compatible with some newer version of Acrobat, which I can't safely upgrade to on my primary system because I have Acrobat Pro 6 and don't want to spend money buying a new version when this one still works fine for my needs, and can't safely install a newer version of Acrobat Reader without risking it making the older Acrobat Pro version malfunction from interference with shared files/settings.
PLEASE go back to the previous backwards-compatible PDFs. I'm sure there are HR people out there not using the latest versions too.
Do you have any answer for my above entries about MS Frauding MCTS people in 2007 and 2008?
1.) That this move is off-loading MS' carbon footprint to other shoulders--we should assume that those who go to the trouble to order a kit are just as likely to go to the trouble to print. Assuming otherwise is counter intuitive.
2.) That if the MCT card follows suit MCTs will have a devil of a time printing the instructor guides at their local print shop or getting a discount at Borders Books.
3.) That waiting for the mail to arrive will forever loose its glamour.
I could not have said it better!
MCPD 3.5 from Colombia
There really is no point anymore, I think.
Being a poster on the original blog thread, I don't overly appreciate the fact that my feedback has been termed a "bash". Whats the point of annoucing things if you dont want 'real' feedback? And what is the point of asking for feedback if you response is basically going to be 'wait til its happened'?
Pretty poor form and kind of sounds like you're a bit frustrated?
Still, lets go through the MS side of story, and try not to be as condescending as they were...
"1) If you don’t believe me when I say that we are genuinely concerned with improving our environmental impact, then we have a trust issue, and frankly, there’s not much point in pursuing the conversation further. "
Thats a VERY poor answer! In other words, if you dont 'agree', go to hell!
The fact remains as I and numerous people have pointed out, that this 'Green Revolution' has targetted the relatively small percentage of MS costomers and products. If MS was really concerned with going green, why are you packaging commercial product in big, hard plastic cases (im sure MS make more of those plastic s/w cases than MCSE wallet cards)? What about the volumes of printed matter MS sells?
If MS was seriously looking at ways to cut its footprint, you'd have thought they would look at the LARGER contributors first (such as those plastic s/w cases that probably take 15,000 years to break down and use up oil resources); but no, that hasn't been done...
"2) If you believe that our paper/plastic solution was more environmentally friendly than our digital solution, I’d love to know—truthfully—how to verify that. "
I dont think anyone is arguing that this is the fact (although as one poster pointed out, ppl are going to have to print their certificate anyway, so the end result is most likley going to see the same amount of paper and ink used; MS will just be shifting who is doing the work!)
But if you look at the posts regarding this, I think you'll find that a lot of ppl were concerned as to why this initiative was targeting MCP's and etc, Alone!
As I mentioned above, if MS was serious about its footprint, why arent you working on OTHER areas, that obviously are more impacting that this... AGAIN I will refer you to the moulded plastic s/w cases!
"3) About the digital wallet cards–let’s be brutally honest, shall we:
Anything on paper is forgeable. There are any number of Internet sites out there that will produce authentic-looking certificates and wallet cards for you for a fee, without requiring you to prove your certification. If you’re going to argue that paper certificates and plastic cards are somehow more authentic than digital ones—or that they are more difficult to forge—you won’t find me to be a receptive audience, sorry. "
and
"Today there is one and only one way to truly prove your certifications to an employer: the transcript sharing tool. The problem with this tool, however, is that it’s fairly obscure and requires you to share an ID and password (which is perfectly safe but feels wrong nonetheless)."
I find this to be a bizarre assertation! So we're talking about 'Going Green', but now we have jumped to 'Going Secure'? Still, I will continue...
'Plastic' photo ID cards are used my the Military to gain access to military bases and secure area's inside those bases. They're used by Uni's to regulate access to secure research labs. Theyre used by our banks and road authorities for identification.
Heavy Paper card certificates are used by Colleges and Universities to prove completion of a Diploma or Degree or Doctorate program.
All these uses above are far more 'critical' than MS, but these organisations all all quite happy with the safety these provide.
How do you think we'd go if military personnel had to print their own ID's? Or you could print you own Licence? Or you had to print your own credit card?
What would an employer think when you show them your degree - printed on a home printer?
MSL always seemed to like to compare itself with higher learning (I'm on my Second Degree now, and I have three Diplomas also), but how do think it would be received if higher learning institution suddenly stopped issuing certificates on graduation? Or stopped issuing student cards?
And to address some more of your points:
"We will aggressively promote the use of these cards as the best way to verify an MCP’s credentials—both to MCPs and to hiring managers—and I fully expect that they will be the most value-reinforcing benefit in the MCP program. "
How's that? An education program involving printed matter? Or an email campaign, that will be swallowed by spam filters? What about those employers who may not have heard about this?
What happens when you have 2 MCSE's, equally qualified; one has nice, original MS certs and the other has home printed stuff. Which one is going to present better?
"Let me go even one step further: I don’t think the digital certificates are any better than the paper ones as far as authenticity goes. I personally have never and would never use my certificates to prove my certifications to a client or employer."
Thats a bit presumptuous... I think that simply means you've never been ASKED to provide certificates. I HAVE been asked to provide copies of certificates and instructed to bring my ORIGINALS to the interview.
My next comment is to ask how your thoughts on Authenticity are fair. YOU DONT THINK there is any difference in Authenticity, BUT you work for MS, you know the system intimately.... But again, what about those employers out there? What employer is NOT going to question the authenticity of a certificate printed at home?
Come on guys, its time to get real about this. In the REAL WORLD, when apply for a job, a lot of applicants supply copies of certicates as a package with an application, and then show up to the interview with originals...
MS is now asking us to COMPLICATE this... Now, instead of supplying a single package containing our Cisco, Citrix and MS certs, we need to supply Cisco and Citrix photocopies, then a disk containing our digital certs and card in leu of supplying a dodgy print out.
Then in the interview, we show off our nice, neat Cisco and Citrix certs and have to bring a laptop, so the interview board can look at out digital certs... (Because lets face it, few interviewers are going to be organised enough to check this stuff beforehand)...
So, I would urge MS to listen to those MANY MCP's who have responded. Think of it this way, in this country (Australia) one letter/email (or otherwise) to a politician is seen as representative of the thoughts and feelings of 1,500 people in the electorate... Now, if you apply that to the number of ppl I see responding here (RESPONDING, not BASHING), I would suggest you have a SIZABLE portion of the informed MCP community are not impressed by this decision.
One of the challenges of on-line communications is getting one's tone to come across the way one intends it to, and given how often I post here and how many readers we have, I'm bound to screw it up once in a while. So I apologize for the offense--it was not at all intended.
To respond to your more specific comments:
When I said there's not much point in pursusing the conversation further if you don't believe we have positive intent, it was certainly *not* a "go to hell" message. It was what I beleive to be a truthful statement: there's really no way for two sides to come together through written discussion when one side doubts the others truthfulness and intent. You can't win trust through arguing, wouldn't you agree, Dan?
As to why we're still packaging our products the way we do, we're making strides there too: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-10273088-17.html
But I think your overall point is that you feel we're singling out MCPs. The truth is that Microsoft has thousands of groups and hundreds of businesses, and we all focus on different products, programs and audiences. Why is Microsoft focusing on certificates when there are bigger environmental fish to fry? Because my team has nothing to do with Windows packaging--we can only affect our learning products. So we do what we can within our sphere of influence and trust that our colleagues are doing the same. Hope that makes sense to you.
Moving on to the wallet card questions: yes, I switched the discusion to "going secure," as that's what those particular comments were focused on. (This thread was in response to feedback from readers)
I understand the point you make about ID cards, but those cards typically also have magnetic strip that are read by ATMs, security badge readers, etc. that verify their authenticity. There's no way to do that with plastic MCP cards. Hence my statements. :-)
And I'm not advocating that anyone print the wallet cards--unlike student IDs, militar IDs, workplace IDs, these cards are not needed for physical access to facilties--better to keep them on-line so that they can serve to truly authenticate one's credentials.
In fact, I think the remainder of your questions and comments seem imply that you think we're recommending that you guys print out your certificates and wallet cards. I'm suggesting: don't.
If you want to display your certificates for pride reasons (as I do), print them and hang them in your office. But if you are primarily concerned with proving your credentials, use the digital wallet cards--they are the only true way to prove your credentials.
Relying on certificates--printed or digital--is not wise. We'll do our best to inform employers of this, and it will undoubtedly take some time. In the meantime, if you are questioned by an employer, you can certainly point them toward our website where we can verify your credentials.
So to sum up:
1) Our official position is that certificates and wallet cards cannot be trusted as proof of one's certifications.
2) The only proof of certification that we stand behind is the on-line transcript (through your transcript sharing ID and code) and upcoming virtual business cards
3) If you still believe it's important to bring certificates to a job interview, you can print out your certificates to do so.
4) If you don't believe that your print-at-home or print-at-printshop certificates will look acceptable to an employer, you can order a certificate from our fulfillment vendor as you have in the past, but it will now cost a shipping and handling fee.
Would it help, Dan, if we had a page on our website that clearly spelled all of this out for employers?
2. MCTS/MCITP is failure without any value. All newcomers to MCP program still ask about MCSA/MCSE.
3. You have frauded people in 2007 and 2008.
4. You have stupid explanations for everything like MCTS not being MCP while being.
5. You get impressive negative feedback that you are ignoring and ignoring by saying it is "only small percentage of MCPs that don't like changes" lol.
6. You site is faulty all the time. Digital Business cards won't be better probably - so people without certs and plastic wallet will be doomed on interviews.
8. There is total mess with quality and types of your paper certs that will be even higher with "white boards" printers/ papers/signs variations.
7. I could write more, but what is the point if you have markeint @#$%$# answers for anything you get.
8. I can hardly imagine that MCP might be even worse, I'm afraid soon you will prove it can.
Secondly digital form of certificates will have a biiger footprint in reprinting , downloading, and reprinting again and again ( since it is not an original why not print one whenever on wants to use it !)
Such a move will have a drastic increase on crabon footprint .. but the thing is that such a desicion might have been taken by morrons who sit in cublcles and now nothing about the real world and who think the world is flat and get their daily news from standup comedians ..
Shame !!!
I'm pretty angry about the digital certs as I think this should be an optional choice and not forced on people. A cert is something to be proud of and I shouldn't have to pay to get an optional cert sent to me as it should be included in the cost. Big own goal on Microsoft's part.