12/19/2001 -- Certiport, the organization that manages the Microsoft Office User Specialist (MOUS) certification program for Microsoft, told CertCities.com yesterday that the full slate of its English-version Office XP exams will be available at all its testing centers worldwide by Jan. 14, with availability in other languages by the end of the month.

Currently, only the Excel Core, Excel Expert, Word Core and Word Expert 2002 exams have been released. And some candidates have reported problems booking these exams because not all U.S.-based testing centers are delivering them.

Bill Wall, vice president of sales, marketing and services for Certiport (formerly Nivo), told CertCities.com that the current availability rate is around 50 percent in the US He said the delay in availability is usually due to test centers (which are often also training centers) waiting until their Office XP training is completely underway before manually installing the exams. However, he told us, that will change on Jan. 14 with a new update of the company's underlying testing software, IQ Software 4.0.

The "mandatory" update will automatically make all English MOUS exams available at all 8,000 testing centers worldwide, he explained. With the new version, not only will the Word and Excel exams be automatically loaded, but also the English versions of the 2002 PowerPoint, Access and Outlook Core exams, which will be officially released on Dec. 28, he told us.

Other enhancements include unique user ID recognition and enhanced remote troubleshooting. The software will be backward-compatible with all previously released MOUS exams.

As for other languages, Wall said that the company plans to have the roster of XP exams released in Spanish, Korean, Finnish, Swedish, German, Italian, Norwegian and Japanese by the end of January, with other languages coming soon after.

Until the upgrade, Wall recommends that any U.S.-based candidates unable to find released MOUS XP exams at their local testing center should call Certiport's customer service line at (888) 222-7890.

For more on the MOUS certification program, click here. -B.N.