• When Do Microsoft Certifications Expire

You have spent tremendous time and effort to earn a certification only to have re-certify a few years down the road. Some might gnash their teeth in protest over this and assume it is only a ploy by the various certification entities to part more money from our pockets and others just think it ridiculous, yet I believe there is validity in this concept of having to recertify or earn continuing education credits. Ours is a field that changes constantly. New technologies are released or new versions of current technologies. There are always new updates and service packs that are released. In other words, the IT field is always changing and we have to keep up with these changes or we risk falling behind the technology power curve.There are some certification programs that require you to either earn Continuing Education credit (taking classes, attending conferences, teaching classes, etc) or to recertify or take a test in the next higher sequence of certification tests (Cisco). There are also some certification organizations that do not require recertification at all - CompTIA being one of them (though they do strongly encourage you to recertify on the newer technologies).

If your teaching certification expires, you must apply for recertification through your state's department of education. The requirements vary by state and often depend on how long you've been away from teaching. If your certificate gets expired there will be no effect. Certificate expiration is not enforced when the certificate is used for encryption. Check for more information. It looks like you're using Transparent Data Encryption. If the certificate that protects the database master key expires, I'm pretty sure that the database will fail to start.

Once you are certified - say on Security+, you are certified for life (or as is found on their web site 'CompTIA certifications are valid for the rest of a professional's career'). This is nice - you take a test and you are certified for life - no fuss and no worries. But let's say you are A+ certified and that you were certified in 2000 - yes, you are A+ certified and for life - but the technology that you originally were tested on is now 8 years old and has changed significantly. Microsoft also had a similar approach. If you are an MCSE on NT4 - you kept that certification, even though there aren't many NT4 networks left (they have changed this approach with the MCTS and MCITP - which I will talk about in another blog).The argument that is put forward for continuing education credits or recertification is that there is concern about the relevancy of the certification with regard to current technology.

Three years,in many cases, is enough time for a technology to have matured enough that you might need a 'refresher'. I like the idea of continuing education credits - if you resit the class, teach a class that covers the material or even jus t attend a conference or seminar - that should suffice.More on Windows Server:.Recent blog posts.

The main reason people become confused when viewing a Code-Signing certificate is that they are thinking about them the same way they do an SSL Certificate, which has an entirely different purpose.An SSL Certificate is intended to secure the transport of information via encryption and as such must always be valid when used, so it should not be expired. This requires that a certificate used for SSL purposes must always be renewed before it expires,since otherwise it would not be valid at the time the client attempts to use it to create a secured connection to the server where it resides.A Code-Signing Certificate on the other hand must have been valid for signing when the code was signed, but may be expired after the code is released. This isn't a problem, because the Digital Signature itself is still OK as long as the file hasn't beenmodified or the certificate hasn't been revoked for some reason.

When Do Microsoft Certifications Expire

Otherwise, these code signing certificates would need to be valid for as long as the code itself might ever be used, which would obviously create other problems in both cost and support. Imaginefor example if you started up an old PC 10 years from now and all of the application's certificates had expired, so all of the installed software simply stopped working or became invalid as a result.So with code signing, there's nothing wrong with an expired certificate, as long as the Signing Time (TimeStamp) for the executable or installer is within the date range for which the certificate itself was valid.

For the initial release version of MSE4.0 you'll notice that the Timestamp was Monday, March 26, 2012, which was well within the associated certificate's valid date range of 2/21/2011 to 5/21/2012.In fact, it really doesn't matter at all if an organization creates malicious code and uses their own certificate to sign it. The reason for this is that the purpose of code signing isn't to indicate that the code is 'safe', it's simply to identifythe organization that created the code. This way, if a program is released with malicious code and contains a certificate, it is known to be associated with that organization, so all other code signed using the same certificate might immediately become suspectas a result. This is why unsigned code is also suspect, since it's highly likely that anyone releasing unsigned code today is trying to circumvent being identified as delivering malware.Since to sign a new piece of code the private key 'secret' must be known, it's not possible to do this without this information, so the code signing itself would not be valid as a result.