Ben Lee - MCA Microsoft 365 Teams Administrator Study Guide

There could be many reasons why you are looking to learn more about Teams and are considering taking the MS-700 exam: to prove to a potential employer that you have the skills to use Teams, to get on-the-job training in a position you already have, or perhaps just because you are interested in it.

The Microsoft certification program is broken into three types of qualifications:

Fundamentals: Usually for people at the early part of their career or starting out, these certifications provide a good grounding in their subject areas.

Associate: These are role-based certificates aimed at people who are already doing or want to learn about the tasks needed in a particular job role.

Expert/Specialist: These are deep qualifications in their areas, and each provides a way to showcase specialist knowledge in a particular area.

This book covers the content required so that you can study for and, we hope, pass the Microsoft MS-700 exam. If you pass this exam, you will earn one of Microsoft's Associate-level certificates and become a Microsoft 365 Certified: Teams Administrator Associate.

This in turn can act as a prerequisite for the more advanced Expert-level certification (Microsoft 365 Certified: Enterprise Administrator Expert) should you want to continue your learning by digging deeper into the M365 services.

It is anticipated that to be ready to take this exam you have been working with Teams in the real world for approximately six months. While this is certainly not a requirement and it is possible to take and pass the exam with no hands-on experience (not that I recommend this approach!), it does give you an idea of what to expect when tackling the exam. There is a lot of ground to cover, and if you have been living and breathing Teams to some degree before taking it, you will certainly find things easier.

For this exam you are expected to have a good understanding of how to manage all the different workloads in Teams and especially how to migrate away from Skype for Business Online. You should have a good idea of how you manage features, either via the Teams Admin Console (or O365 Security and Compliance Center, Azure AD, or SharePoint Admin) or via the command line with PowerShell, but as this is an Associate-level exam, you are not expected to be an expert in advanced workloads, such as detailed call routing and so on.

However, do not underestimate the importance of the calling and media workloads. This can account for 30 percent of the exam and is something easily overlooked if you are used to dealing only with the collaboration aspects of Teams. This is something that is given a lot of attention by Microsoft because it is something visible to end users if it does not work right. You need to take the time to understand how media works and how the network should be configured to accommodate it.

Remember that the exam is also targeting enterprise-level knowledge, so it will be discussing features that need an E5 license, particularly in the security and compliance space. If you work for a Microsoft Partner, the Demos ( https://demos.microsoft.com/) site will let you create fully featured test or demo tenants that are prepopulated with sample users to practice with. If you are not able to access the Demos site, you may be eligible for a Teams Exploratory License ( https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/teams-exploratory), which gives you functionality equivalent to an E3 license for a trial. There is a requirement here to already have a domain and Azure AD configured in O365. If all else fails, you can sign up for Teams free ( https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/free) and at least get access to the core application and configuration options. Chapter 1has some more ideas and information about how you can get access to your own Teams tenant for testing.

The exam will have between 45 and 60 questions. Some questions may be worth more than one point, and some may be worth nothing (as Microsoft may be testing new questions to enter the rotation), so the important thing is to try not to get ruffled by anything you are not sure about.

There is definitely a certain mindset that can help you take the MS certification exams; for example, as you go through the exam, later questions may jog your memory or give you a clue to something that you were stuck on earlier, so flag anything you are not sure about to come back to later. That said, some questions will not let you skip forward, as they could be part of a multiple-question scenario. The MS-700 exam will normally have at least one of these scenario sections that will be approximately 10 questions long.

Questions are traditionally multiple choice; however, there are several different formats that you might come across, including the following:

Build list

Active screen

Drag and drop

Case study

You can see the full list of possible question types at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/certifications/certification-exams.

Case study questions aim to give you some real-world information that is then used across multiple questions. The information usually takes the form of paragraphs of information and then some supplementary data, such as tables, and so on. You can refer to this data as you need to during the subsequent questions. When answering case study questions, the text of the question will usually give you a specific clue about which part of the case study you should pay close attention to. For example, it might ask about what policy will meet the HR security requirements, in which case make sure you read the security requirement section closely.

You may also find some simulation or lab-based questions where you are given access to a sample environment and are expected to configure particular things. This is where having some real-world experience with Teams is helpful, as the chances are that it may look slightly different in real life than it does in books or training materials (because of the ever-evolving nature of the product). Simulation questions come in and out of favor, so you may not have any.

To pass the exam, you need to score at least 700 out of a possible 1,000 points available on the test; however, this does not directly correlate with a percentage-based score, as some questions can be weighted up or down. There is no distinction between passing with 700 points or full marks; a pass is a pass.

Don't just study the questions and answers! The questions on the actual exam will be different from the practice questions included in this book. The exam is designed to test your knowledge of a concept or objective, so use this book to learn the objectives behind the questions.

Here are some tips for taking the exam:

Give yourself plenty of time to take the exam. The official run time is 2.5 hours, so there is no need to rush things.

Read everything carefully; it can be easy to jump to conclusions about the right answer to a question and throw away points.

If you are not sure about a question, do not get stuck staring at the screen. Flag it for review and move on. You should be able to come back to it later. The exam will notify you if you cannot return.

PowerShell cmdlets used in questions can get you in a muddle, as often the cmdlets will vary by a single word or so. Look carefully at the other combinations in the other options, as this can help you rule out cmdlets that are definitely not valid. If in doubt, use the trick from the previous point and flag the question to come back to; another question or screenshot may clue you into what the right wording will be.