Setup

I passed the MS-700 Teams Administrator Associate exam yesterday. I spent roughly 6 weeks studying for the certification over evenings and weekends to supplement 2 years of helpdesk experience.

Overall, I found the exam to be difficult, but not necessarily “tricky”, which is a big relief. I have no problem with rigorous exams, as long as the test writers aren’t injecting artificial difficulty via obfuscated wording and gotcha edge cases. A passing grade is 700 / 1000, and I scored a 764, which is almost exactly what I’ve scored on every other certification exam I’ve taken.

The study guide and objectives for the MS-700 include:

• Configure and manage a Teams environment (40–45%)
• Manage teams, channels, chats, and apps (20–25%)
• Manage meetings and calling (15–20%)
• Monitor, report on, and troubleshoot Teams (15–20%)

Study Strategy

I went through all the Microsoft learning modules in great detail. As I read, I took basic notes that focused on the material that was just begging for a test question. I also took regular detours to make sense of material I couldn’t understand from the modules. Skim the stuff I already do for helpdesk tickets, deep dive on features that I was unfamiliar with.

I took the Microsoft practice assessment repeatedly (scoring 38% the first time, 50%, 66%, eventually scoring ~80%-90% the day before my exam). After I began to memorize the specific questions, I challenged myself by covering up the answers and trying to force myself to think of the solution without any context clues from the multiple choice options. The practice assessment is a good tool to focus studying, but the question format on the real exam feels very different.

I referenced a handful of YouTube channels and blogs, and even purchased (and returned without reading) one book. Overall, no resources I found had any special insight for the MS-700 material; sometimes it is just nice watching a British guy explain Teams phone systems to take a break from reading the docs.

By far, the indispensable study tool for the exam was my access to a 365 E5 developer tenant. The exam is highly practical, and I never would have passed without getting hands on experience fiddling with policies and settings in the various admin centers. More about that below.

Others have already done a great job consolidating study resources for the MS-700, and some of the Udemy courses might have been enough to supplement the docs if I hadn’t been lucky enough to have a practice tenant available.

Takeaways

In no particular order, my observations, insights, gripes, and eternal regrets:

Scope (How much do I have to know to pass?)

Knowing 100% of the material in the learning modules definitely isn’t enough. You have to click through to read the linked Teams docs, and there will still be exam questions testing for material in other sections of the sprawling website.

I think of the scope for Microsoft exams by drawing an analogy from WGET, the command line tool to download HTML content from webpages. You can specify the recursive retrieval depth for how many links the tool should click through. You want to be liberal enough to download more than the welcome page, but conservative enough to avoid iterating through the entire contents of the internet.

For the MS-700, I’d say you need a max recursive depth of 2. You might get questions from material in the learning modules, from the MS docs that they link to, or potentially from the links in those docs.

Open book exams

You get access to learn.microsoft.com during the test. That is a great step in the right direction for a realistic exam. A technician who is even decently skilled at searching for and reading documentation has access to far more knowledge than a tech who is extraordinarily talented at memorizing stuff.

During the exam, you can’t CTRL + F to search for keywords in a document, and can’t navigate to other websites. But you can filter by Content Area and Products. I got several questions that I would have otherwise missed by filtering for Documentation and Microsoft Teams, or for Reference if I was checking the syntax of a PowerShell cmdlet.

Save time for the lab

My exam was divided into two sections. The first consisted of various multiple choice formats, with a handful of questions that couldn’t be reviewed after answering them. Once I moved ahead from that section, I had a practical lab, broken down into a dozen specific tasks.

I spent a lot of time reviewing the questions in the first section, and only set aside 30 minutes for the lab. That wasn’t enough. I had expected the lab tasks to take, say, twice as long to read and answer as a multiple choice question. But they were much more involved, and I could have definitely used a full hour on them.

It is a bit irritating that Microsoft structures their exams in this way. I can see the advantages of not allowing a savvy test-taker to earn a couple extra points by guessing based on context from other questions. But they don’t provide a good way to estimate how to manage your time - it would also suck to start the lab too early, finish with 30 minutes to spare, and fail because you didn’t double-check the questions in the first section, and have no way to get back to them.

E5 developer tenant in 2024

As I said, I am really lucky that I had access to the practice tenant a coworker set up before the program rules changed. I had expected to create my own tenant, but as of writing this post, you have to have a paid subscription to Visual Studio Professional or Enterprise.

I hope that, in the future, Microsoft either opens up access again, or at least creates some sort of non-persistent sandbox tenant to imitate the real thing. There are some more details about the change in this post.

CompTIA vs Microsoft exams assumptions

CompTIA certifications generally seem to assume that the test-taker is going to use some sort of learning materials to study up until they can pass. The candidate might very well know nothing about networking or security practices before they start. Earning the certification is simply meant to prove that they had the grit to memorize the concepts and jargon.

Microsoft exams come from a different set of expectations. They assume that the candidate is already an MS administrator, and has years of experience doing the work. The certification is just supposed to serve as evidence of that experience.

This might not seem like a big difference, but I do notice it come into play in a lot of small ways:

• Microsoft isn’t too concerned about working with partners who offer accurate practice tests.
• Microsoft isn’t as concerned with defining exactly how much the candidate is expected to know.
• Their learning modules are designed to be a quick review for a mid-level technician who just needs to fill in a few gaps in their understanding.
• Their learning modules (and sometimes even the docs) are stippled with little inconsistencies and outdated details that make them, at best, a wobbly source of truth.

Exams like the MS-700 aren’t intended to teach you how to be a Teams administrator; they are intended to verify that you already are one.

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