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I Passed the MS-700: Teams Administrator Associate Exam
Passed MS-700 🐣
I recently passed the Microsoft 365 Certified: Teams Administrator Associate (MS-700) exam. (Yay! 🐣)
The MS-700 exam is designed for Microsoft Teams administrators and tests the knowledge required for managing and deploying Teams.
- Since Teams integrates with other M365 services (such as SharePoint), those areas are also covered.
| Exam Date | Score | Number of Questions | Exam Duration |
|---|---|---|---|
| September 2024 | 770 points (Passing: 700 / 1000) | I remember there being slightly over 50 | 140 minutes total |
I also decided to take the exam at a test center this time. You can take it from home, but apparently, you need to set up various things beforehand... so I figured a test center would be easier and quietly headed to the venue 🐤
(You don't need to bring anything besides your ID, and the venue I used provided partitions and earplugs, so I'm glad I chose the test center.)
Note) Regarding registration and how to take the exam
These articles seem easy to understand (Note: links are in Japanese):
Official explanation here:
🖋 About the Exam Content
The exam scope is listed on the page below, so it might be good to check it beforehand.
Exam Topics
My impression was that there were many questions related to policy application (ranging from meetings and apps to calling) and scenarios involving using Teams in a VDI environment.
Conversely, there were fewer questions about the Skype for Business -> Teams migration than I expected.
*Since Skype for Business Online has already retired, that makes sense (-ω-)/
There were also specific command-line questions for PowerShell, which panicked me, but I managed to get through using the "searching on MS Learn" strategy mentioned later 💦
Exam Structure
It was broadly divided into three sections:
- Case study questions
- Standard exam questions
- Sequential questions
Regarding "1. Case study questions," it took me a while to understand how to read the screen, so I recommend getting used to the UI using the Exam Sandbox beforehand so you don't panic.
📖 About Study Methods
Conclusion: Get used to MS Learn
After taking the exam, I concluded that the most important thing is to get used to the MS Learn site.
This is because—as I realized during the test—you can actually look things up on the MS Learn site during the exam. (You can search the site to confirm information for questions you're unsure about 👀)
→ However, the MS Learn site has its quirks, and if you don't have a good idea of the keywords to search for, you might not find the information quickly. It seems better to have at least a vague memory like, "Oh, this info was on this page."
Also, I took the exam in Japanese this time, but since you can switch to the English version of the questions at any time, it might be an option to search in English if the articles don't show up well.
Note) Looking up information is only allowed for role-based exams
I felt this makes sense since in actual practice, you don't need to memorize every single feature and specification perfectly.
Effective Methods
Even though you can view MS Learn during the exam, there isn't enough time to look up every single thing, so here are the study methods that I found effective 🐣
1. Skim through MS Learn courses
MS Learn has courses specifically prepared for the exam, so I went through them. (I read them idly to pass the time during my commute 💤)
You might encounter some confusing content, but trying to research everything on your own might make it even more confusing. I think it's better to prioritize finishing one pass and just skim through it with a "Huh, okay, so this exists" kind of mindset.
2. Get a visual idea through videos and hands-on labs
While MS Learn courses do include screenshots occasionally, some look like Japanese text was pasted over English screens (not the actual Japanese UI). Using only these, it's honestly hard to visualize the operations (´・ω・`)
Therefore, I recommend getting a feel for the UI through videos or hands-on practice (actually clicking through it) 🖱
On Udemy, the following course was very easy to understand because it shows many actual screens and provides supplementary background knowledge: Note: The entire course is 12 hours long, which is quite voluminous, so it might be good to focus on the areas you're not comfortable with.
On YouTube, the following video explains everything comprehensively, though for ease of understanding, the Udemy course above might be better (it's a good video for getting an overview first):
I think it's best to progress through these little by little during your commute or before bed, even if you're dozing off.
3. Repeatedly solve official practice questions
After getting a general idea from steps 1 and 2, I tried practice questions.
Initially, I used ExamTopics, but since the questions are in English, I had to figure out what the terms were in Japanese, which was a bit inefficient.
Example: "Teams communications support engineer" is translated as "Teams 通信サポート エンジニア" in Japanese (using "通信/tsushin" instead of "コミュニケーション/communication").
While it doesn't hurt to do it to get through many questions, I don't feel it's a must.
What I recommend even more is repeatedly taking the "Free Practice Assessment" linked on the Study Guide page.
// I discovered its existence through this tweet, but I wish I had known about it sooner...
What's great about it is that not only does it tell you whether your answer was correct or incorrect for each question, but it also provides proper links to the relevant documentation (and you can take it in Japanese).
Also, there are a lot of questions, and I liked that even when taking it repeatedly, new questions I hadn't seen before would appear.
Closing
I was worried about whether I would pass, but I'm relieved to have successfully passed.
I hope this is helpful to anyone who will take the MS-700 exam in the future 🐣
Discussion