MS-700 Managing Teams Exam Preparation

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I am pleased to announce that I recently passed the MS-700 Managing Teams exam. I’ll be preparing for the MS-100 exam next but before I make a start, I thought it would be a great idea to blog about my experience and how I prepared for the exam.

The MS-700 exam measures your ability to accomplish the following technical tasks: plan and configure a Microsoft Teams environment; manage chat, calling, and meetings; and manage Teams and app policies.

Candidates for this exam are Microsoft Teams Administrators for their organisation. The Microsoft Teams Administrator configures, deploys, and manages Office 365 workloads for Microsoft Teams that focus on efficient and effective collaboration and communication in an enterprise environment.

The Teams Administrator must be able to plan, deploy, and manage Teams chat, apps, channels, meetings, audio conferencing, live events, and calling. The Teams Administrator is also responsible for upgrading from Skype for Business to Teams.

The Teams Administrator collaborates with Telephony engineers to integrate advanced voice features into Microsoft Teams. This role is not responsible for configuring direct routing, configuring call routing, or integrating telephony. The Teams Administrator may work with other workload administrator roles, including security and compliance, messaging, networking, identity, and devices.

Candidates for this exam should be proficient at managing Teams settings by using PowerShell. The Teams Administrator has a fundamental understanding of integration points with apps and services, including but not limited to SharePoint, OneDrive for Business, Exchange, Azure AD, and Office 365 Groups. The Teams Administrator understands how to integrate external apps and services.

You only need to take the one exam to achieve Microsoft 365 Certified: Teams Administrator Associate

Please note: that the content of this exam will be updated on November 24, 2020. You can download the skills measured document at Exam MS-700: Managing Microsoft Teams

How I studied for the MS-700 exam:

There are a number of websites available offering courses for preparing for the exam so you’ll find that other bloggers may have taken a different route to prepare for the exam, but the destination is the same, to understand and learn the skills required to pass the exam. As you go through your studies, you’ll find out more about the architecture of Microsoft Teams, how the application relies on a number of Microsoft services and the Teams Location of data

There is a lot to understand but I promise that you will really enjoy studying for this exam if you have the passion. It’s a great certification you’re earning because as you know Microsoft Teams is growing rapidly and the most recent stats at the time of writing this blog post is that Teams is being used by over 115 million users daily! This number is going to grow.

Studying for this certification means your experience with managing Teams will become greater and you’ll be able to go back to your employer with a lot more knowledge then you had previously. You may be able to recommend additional improvements within you internal security, compliance and governance departments. Share your knowledge and improve the user experience.

Please take the time to study each area, pause the video, do some extra research, lab it, understand it and then continue with the video. It’s important that you understand before moving on.

Let’s move on to how I prepared. Just so you are aware, I watched around 20 hours of videos and read a large number of articles. It really depends on how passionate you are about passing this exam and then putting that knowledge into action.

MS-700 Teams Study Guide

  1. Firstly, it’s important that you visit and download the skills measured document on the Microsoft website to understand what the exam will cover. There is a PDF download link available towards the bottom of the MS-700 exam page. Microsoft also offer a free learning path to help you prepare for the exam. Both can be found at Exam MS-700: Managing Microsoft Teams.

    Just another reminder that the content of this exam will be updated on November 24, 2020. You can download the skills measured document at the link above.

  2. I signed up to a number of Microsoft Teams related sessions at Microsoft Ignite (Virtual due to the Covid-19 Pandemic). It was great to know about what’s new with Teams and live sessions with the experts were a bonus. As the event is over you can visit the following link What’s New in Microsoft Teams. Please note that new Microsoft Teams features are continuously being released so stay up to date as you’ll find the link above may be out dated.

  3. Keep an eye on this great Microsoft website – Microsoft 365 Roadmap. The site includes details on what Microsoft are rolling out, what’s in development and what has already been rolled out. I would recommend visiting this site from time to time to allow you to keep up to date on O365 updates.

  4. Twitter! In my opinion, Twitter is the main social media platform that all the Microsoft Engineers, MVP’s and experts hang out. It’s a great platform to keep up to date with what’s going on with Microsoft Teams and other products and services. You can connect with the guys who work with Microsoft Teams day in day out. You’ll also find a few Microsoft Teams User Groups and their free to join so do take advantage of this and don’t be shy to ask questions if you’re not sure about something. I have had a great experience on Twitter and have managed to connect with some great techies who are also passionate about sharing knowledge and growing the community.

  5. Sign up for a free 1 month Office 365 E3 license. You don’t want to be configuring settings on a live environment. If you don’t want to continue with the free trial after the month, please ensure that you cancel the subscription via the portal, or else you will be charged for the following month. It’s not a trial which will stop after one month. Something to keep in mind.

    If you don’t want to sign up for the 30 day trial, you could also sign up for the free Microsoft 365 Developer Program. It’s a renewable 90-day Microsoft 365 E5 developer subscription. As a program member, you can get a free Microsoft 365 developer subscription with 25 user licenses to use to build your solutions. This subscription will remain active for as long as you’re actively developing and deploying solutions. More details on the program can be located here

  6. Time, you really need to work out when you’ll be studying for this exam and setup a schedule. Will your employer allow you to study for the exam in working hours? or do you need to study for the exam in your own time?

  7. I went through a great course by Skylines Academy at Microsoft MS-700 Certification: Managing Teams. Includes practice test questions.

  8. In case you’re not aware, Skype for Online Business is going end of life July 2021 and will no longer be available. That’s right it will stop working! If you have not migrated to Teams, starting planning now. If you’re studying for the exam prior to July 2021, it’s VERY important that you understand the complete process of migrating from Skype For Online Business to Microsoft Teams. If you’re sitting the exam after July 2021, remember that Microsoft are still supporting the On premise version of Microsoft Skype For Business until the year 2024 so the exam will most likely cover Skype for Business On premise to Teams migration type of questions. You will need to understand the process involved in migrating from Skype for Online Business and on premise to Microsoft Teams. Below are links to the great videos that I watched. Highly recommended. It is very important that you understand the migration process as you will be tested on this in the exam.


    Introduction to Upgrade from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams (Upgrade part 1 of 4)

    Plan your upgrade from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams (Upgrade part 2 of 4)

    Manage Coexistence and Interoperability between SfB and Teams (Upgrade part 3 of 4)

    Administrator experience for the upgrade from SfB to Teams (Upgrade part 4 of 4)

  9. Know the Teams Admin Center like the back of your hand. You may be used to working in the O365 Portal and know where all the required policies are. But do you know where all those policies are located without looking. For example, what policies are located in Teams, where would you need to configure 365 group permissions, Access Reviews, expiration policies, retention, private channel permissions, meeting settings, network planner, reporting, alerting, chat permissions, barrier policies, and so on. There will be questions based on policies inside and outside the Teams Admin Center, and where you would need to configure the required settings.

  10. I then visited the skills measured document on the Microsoft website again (See step 1) and went through the skills measured. I performed additional research on the features where I believed further reading and research was required. For example, if you want to know more about direct routing, visit the Coffee in the Cloud YouTube channel and visit the video Direct Routing. Or if you want to learn more about Network Planner you may want to perform a search and visit a post such as Use the Network planner for Microsoft Teams. Or you may want to revisit your training video’s depending on where you’re learning, whether that’s via Microsoft Learn, CloudSkills.io, Skyline Academy or Udemy. There is lots of great content out there.

    It’s important that if you don’t understand something from the training videos or articles, perform a search and study further. Or make a note and come back to that topic if you wish to move on.

I am happy to help, so if you have any questions please contact me via my Twitter Handle @ITSupportBlog

All the best and i’m sure you will enjoy preparing for this exam like i did.

Thanks for reading my post and please share 🙂

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