Commsverse: Commsverse.com
MSUC.Chat: MSUC.Chat
He currently works as the Microsoft Technology Lead for a global premium communications company, helping them build a best-in-class Direct Routing as a Service offering, and works with companies of all shapes and sizes to help them smoothly migrate their telephony workloads to Teams.
You can contact Ben via his website (bibble-it.com or LearnTeams.Info ), LinkedIn (https://linkedin.com/in/benleeuk), or on Twitter as @Bibbleq (https://twitter.com/bibbleq).
About the Technical Editor
Jon Buhagiar, BS/ITM, MCSE, CCNA, is an information technology professional with two decades of experience in higher education and the private sector.
Jon currently serves as supervisor of network operations at Pittsburgh Technical College. In this role, he manages datacenter and network infrastructure operations and IT operations and is involved in managing projects supporting the quality of education at the College. He also serves as an adjunct instructor in PTC’s Information Technology department, where he has taught courses for Microsoft and Cisco certification. He has been an instructor for more than 22 years at several colleges in the Pittsburgh area, since the introduction of the Windows NT MCSE in 1998.
Jon earned a bachelor of science degree in information technology management from Western Governors University. He also achieved an associate degree in business management from Pittsburgh Technical College. He has recently become a Windows Server 2016 Microsoft Certified Solutions Expert (MCSE) and earned the Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA) certification. Other certifications include CompTIA Network+, CompTIA A+, and CompTIA Project+.
In addition to his professional and teaching roles, Jon has authored CCNA Routing and Switching Practice Tests: Exam 100-105, Exam 200-105, and Exam 200-125; CompTIA Network+ Review Guide: Exam N10-007, 4th Edition; CompTIA A+ Deluxe Study Guide: Exam 220-1002 (all Sybex, 2016); and CCNA Certification Practice Tests: Exam 200-301, 1st Edition. He has also served as the technical editor for the second edition of the CompTIA Cloud+ Study Guide (Sybex, 2016), CCNA Security Study Guide: Exam 210-260 (Sybex, 2018); CCNA Cloud Complete Study Guide: Exam 210-451 and Exam 210-455 (Sybex, 2018); CCNP Enterprise Certification Study Guide: Implementing (Sybex, 2018); and Operating Cisco Enterprise Network Core Technologies: Exam 300-401 (Sybex, 2020). He has spoken at several conferences about spam and email systems. He is an active radio electronics hobbyist and has held a ham radio license for the past 18 years, KB3KGS. He experiments with electronics and has a strong focus on the Internet of Things (IoT).
Introduction
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.
The MS-700 Exam
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 1 has some more ideas and information about how you can get access to your own Teams tenant for testing.
Exam Format
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;
