Managing Microsoft Teams: MS-700 Exam Guide
Configure and manage Microsoft Teams workloads and achieve Microsoft 365 certification with ease
Peter Rising
Nate Chamberlain
BIRMINGHAM—MUMBAI
Managing Microsoft Teams: MS-700 Exam Guide
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Foreword
Microsoft Teams is important
As the fastest-growing app in Microsoft history, Microsoft considers Teams so important that in a recent interview with the Financial Times, Satya Nadella said that Teams will become a "digital platform as significant as the internet browser." It's yet another accolade in an incredible story for an app that – by the time this book is published – will only be 4 years old. Having entered general availability in the spring of 2017 after it was developed in an internal hackathon, Teams is a converged application, bringing together communication and collaboration workloads such as chats, meetings, calling, and apps. It has won Enterprise Connect twice. It is now used by over 90% of the Fortune 100. It is available in over 180 markets and supports over 50 languages. Today, we know that the global Daily Active Usage (DAU) is somewhere north of 115 million. Back in July 2019 when Microsoft announced that Teams had overtaken Slack in terms of usage at Microsoft Inspire, the DAU stood at only 13 million.
So, this raises the million-dollar question: what has fueled the growth of Microsoft Teams since the latter half of 2019? What has caused this explosion in usage? All things considered, the principal factor driving its usage has undoubtedly been Covid-19. As the pandemic has spread across borders and over continents, organizations of every type in every vertical in every country have needed to adapt to a new way of working to survive or function. Life as we know it has changed. With the shift of many organizations to operating remotely, Teams has been key in helping them achieve continuity and resilience while allowing people to stay in touch. Students can still go to school and both learn and interact with their teachers. Patients can still see their doctors for a consult. By bringing together the tools we need to work effectively and the means to communicate seamlessly with others, Teams has helped many of us be just as productive as before – or sometimes even more productive.
Yet even though Covid brought what Microsoft considered to be "2 years of digital transformation in 2 months," it hasn't been the only reason for Teams' growth. Firstly, the rapid rate of innovation in Teams, where Microsoft has listened extensively to users and loaded its development assets into the product, has led to a continuous stream of new features that has refined Teams at an amazing pace.
Private channels, custom backgrounds, shared system audio, Together mode, Large Gallery view, policy packages, tighter integration with SharePoint, tighter integration with the Power Platform, the introduction of Teams on Linux, and Skype consumer interop are just some of these features. Even the small additions that backfill Skype for Business functionality, such as Longest Idle, Busy on Busy, and Simultaneous Ring, keep on increasing Teams' value. Secondly, Microsoft has worked hard the last few years on the extensibility of Teams.
Now supporting an ecosystem of over 800 store applications, any organization can build upon the out-of-the-box functionality and customize Teams to suit their needs. Having broadened the extensibility surface to include channels, chat, UI components, and even meetings, organizations can develop their own apps, bots, or messaging extensions, or even connect Teams to third-party apps they have already invested in via connectors and webhooks. They can do so using a full-code approach with their own tools or SPFX, or they can do so using a low-code or no-code approach with the Power Platform.
When organizations begin to use Teams as a base upon which other applications are developed, accessed, and surfaced, it is what we call "Teams as a Platform." This is the digital platform to which Satya refers: bringing what you need into one space, enabling continuity of workflow across apps, and enabling the accessing of apps from anywhere on any device, benefitting all workers, including those in frontline roles. It is a new phase for Teams that will see it go beyond simply being a communications and collaboration app to being an app that looks more like an operating system such as Windows.
Finally, the growth of Teams has happened because overall, Teams is very user-friendly. In addition to resonating with and appealing to how users aspire to work in the modern age, it is a great way to access and adopt the rest of the Microsoft 365 stack, increasing the return for organizations that have chosen to invest in it. When you have a conversation on Teams, you are leveraging Exchange Online. When you upload a file to Teams, you are using OneDrive or SharePoint. The point is, by bringing collaboration and communication workloads together, by bringing apps into Teams and using Teams as a platform, users are getting a great user experience, organizations have a single place where users can easily access and use the apps they need to do their best work, and Microsoft knows that their customers are more likely to begin using apps that they may never have used previously, such as Stream, Yammer, and even core apps such as SharePoint. This explains why Teams isn't an additional cost and why it's included within every Microsoft 365 subscription. It's no coincidence that with the DAU of Teams now being 115 million, SharePoint's Monthly Average Usage (MAU) has grown to 200 million.
Our look at the importance of Teams and why it has grown sets us up to look at the importance of the Teams administrator. It is the Teams administrator who is at the very center of the organization, driving digital transformation. They are accountable for how Teams is configured and administered, and they may also play a large part in how users adopt Teams, wherever they may be in the world. It is a role that will be increasingly seen as critical in terms of administration and the user experience of Microsoft 365. The Teams administrator will work with most, if not all, other administrators in the team, and they may get hands-on with some really cool devices. They will be expected to keep up with all the latest innovations to harness new functionality and make Teams work better.
Typical projects in which a Teams administrator may be involved could include migrating on-premises legacy file servers to the cloud so that each team in the organization can access and co-author files in Teams with other users inside and outside of the organization. The role could include setting up audio conferencing, the phone system, and calling plans so users can use Teams as a fully fledged phone and conferencing system, including building auto attendants and call queues, deploying common area phones, and procuring certified devices for each user. The role could also include applying advanced compliance features such as Data Loss Prevention (DLP) and communications compliance to ensure that sensitive data and PII isn't disclosed within Teams chats and channel conversations to adhere to regulatory standards.
What is critical and what makes for a great Teams administrator is putting users at the center of everything. How can you help make their day better? How can the latest innovations help make their lives easier given what your organization also needs you to achieve? Does this app improve what members of the team need to do, within the bounds of compliance? Is this team optimally configured? Do we have too many teams and need to introduce a life cycle policy to make sure we aren't weighed down with a sprawl of teams? Have we configured, and do employees know about, all the accessibility features, so that Teams can be as inclusive as possible for the benefit of all?
Getting to the business end, passing the MS-700 Managing Microsoft Teams exam will earn you the Teams Administrator Associate certification. Whether you sit the exam because you need to sit it for your role, to advance, or if it is part of your journey to Enterprise Administrator, or even if you simply have a passion for Teams or certifications, each of these reasons is equally valid. I sat the exam myself when it was in beta and did so simply because I wanted to validate my own experience and see how much I knew.
Now, to really understand MS-700, it's recommended to have a read through and deconstruct the skills outline. There is one word that crops up time and time again. It's also in the title of the exam. This word is manage. MS-700 is an exam designed for the all-up administrator. It's not one aimed at the developer, nor the voice or endpoint specialist. It is for the administrator who manages Teams in a typical midmarket to enterprise-size organization on a day-to-day basis. These administrators are fluent in the Teams Admin Centre (TAC); may have performed a migration from Skype for Business to Teams; have configured and maintained core workloads; have configured security and compliance features within Microsoft 365; have digested the weekly usage reports; have built policies; and understand the Teams life cycle, the architecture, how to configure a Teams room system, and how and when to use Powershell.
The exam does not, for example, go deep into graph or direct routing, or the ins and outs of App Studio. Indeed, in my experience of all the Microsoft exams I have taken, this one is both fair and well designed. I always like to say so when an exam has been clearly authored by those who have experience in the field. It's not broad to the point of being unwieldy, nor is it ridiculously deep and granular. It doesn't contain excessive amounts of Powershell. If you have truly engaged with and managed Teams for a period of 12 months, you should be familiar with or should have at least touched upon 70% of what is in the exam, and with this book, you should be able to go on and give it your best.
However, it would be remiss of me as a Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT) if I didn't give you two things to be aware of before sitting the exam, which are two reasons many candidates fail if they lack exposure to the functionality in their own Microsoft 365 environments. The first thing is to remember that this is an enterprise exam; that's stated explicitly in the exam description. In other words, if you haven't already been hands-on with E5 functionality such as retention for Teams chats and conversations, DLP, communications compliance, information barriers, and entitlement in Azure Active Directory, now is the time. Secondly, a significant proportion of MS-700 is devoted to the calling workload, maybe up to 30% when networking is factored in. If your management experience has been limited to a voice-less Teams instance, then this could very well be a struggle. If you are a Microsoft partner, then Microsoft's CDX platform at demos.microsoft.com is a must; otherwise, it is strongly recommended that you test drive Phone System, audio conferencing, and those domestic and international call plans and use them alongside this book to get up to speed in this area.
To close, I want to clearly articulate what I feel this book brings to studying for the exam; having recently read it, I certainly wish something like this existed when I took the beta. Firstly, the book is very thorough but economical. It gives you all of what you need to know in digestible and well-ordered chapters that align with the exam objective domains, and it provides a significant number of screenshots as visual aids for reference and for working through in your own Microsoft 365 environment. At the end of every chapter, you'll be asked several multiple-choice or scenario-based questions to test your knowledge and assess your understanding, and should you want to read more around the topic at hand, there is a handy list of links to further reading.
Secondly, the book provides a mock exam, which is excellent preparation for the real exam and excellent value, given the price of the official Microsoft practice test. Last but not least, the book is written by Nate Chamberlain and Peter Rising, who are not only established authors in the Microsoft 365 space but also both MVPs, Teams evangelists, and "learn it alls" who have both sat and passed the exam themselves. Having known Nate and Peter personally for some time, I know how passionate they both are about helping others, making technical content accessible and understandable for all, and raising the general level of understanding about Teams. Unlike authors who churn out books simply because they can, Nate and Peter have dedicated their own time to making this book the very best book it could be. When they asked, I was delighted to have the opportunity to write this foreword.
I wish you the very best of luck and every success in your studies.
Chris Hoard
Teams MVP and MCT Regional Lead
Contributors
About the authors
Peter Rising is a Microsoft 365 Enterprise Administrator Expert, MCT, and Microsoft MVP in Office apps and services. He has worked for several IT solutions providers and private organizations in a variety of technical roles focusing on Microsoft technologies. Since 2014, Peter has specialized in the Microsoft 365 platform. He holds a number of Microsoft certifications, including MCSE: Productivity, MCSA: Office 365, Microsoft 365 Certified: Enterprise Administrator Expert, Microsoft 365: Security Administrator Associate, and Microsoft 365 Certified: Teams Administrator Associate. He is also the author of another Packt book, which is an MS-500 exam guide.
Nate Chamberlain is a Microsoft 365 Enterprise Administrator Expert, MCT, and Microsoft MVP in Office apps and services. He has 6 years of experience in helping organizations deploy Microsoft 365 apps and services and promoting their usage, governance, and adoption. His work has included administrative, analyst, and trainer roles in the higher education, healthcare, corporate, and finance sectors. Nate is the author of several other books, including an MS-101 exam guide, an MS-500 exam guide, an Office 365 administration cookbook, and a handful of smaller publications on SharePoint, OneNote, and leading advocate groups. Nate speaks at user groups and conferences both in person and virtually throughout the year.
About the reviewers
Adam Deltinger has been in the IT industry for almost 15 years and has in the last 4 years been focusing on helping customers work more efficiently, productively, securely, and collaboratively using the Microsoft 365 platform. He has also been an Microsoft MVP for a couple of years, focusing on helping people increase value with Microsoft Teams and end-user adoption, doing talks all over the world, and being very active in the Microsoft community.
Amanda Sterner's favorite feeling in her job is when she can see that someone has actually understood how a new way of working can benefit them and be a gain instead of a pain. For the last few years, Amanda has been working with the modern workplace, collaboration, and productivity and has more recently been focusing on Microsoft Teams and how it can make daily work life better. When asked about what she does at work, Amanda usually replies, "Everything Microsoft 365 that isn't code," and that pretty much sums up her interest in being a part in all things that go on before, during, and after an implementation of Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams. Amanda's main goal is to help you start loving Microsoft Teams the same way she does!
Mike Swantek is a solutions architect and seasoned business professional. Mike leverages his corporate experience, strategy, and vision to help add significant value to companies by utilizing Microsoft products and solutions. Mike has demonstrated achievements in SharePoint, SharePoint Online, business intelligence, process improvement, enterprise content management, information security, and project management in his 25+ year career in business and IT. Mike enjoys speaking at various events throughout the year and is also a musician in the local Detroit, Michigan area.
Linus Cansby has worked as a consultant with Unified Communication for many years now. With experience from LCS, OCS, Lync, Skype for Business, and Teams, he has a lot of experience with Microsoft meeting and voice solutions. He blogs at his personal blog (lync.se), hosts the podcast Teamspodden (Swedish only), and is an active member of the community. When not helping out in the community, he spends time with customers in his job as a consultant at Uclarity; he works with customers mainly in Teams implementation and improvement projects.
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