 Well, it was a good run, albeit maybe a short and misguided one, but after just three years Microsoft announced on February 1, 2023 that they are going to retire the MS-600 exam and the associated Microsoft 365 certification for Teams application developers. While they hinted at some sort of replacement, those details are missing and just vaguely mentioned in a new experience in passing. Why are they doing this? How does this impact whether you're already certified or if you're already preparing for the exam? Well, in this video I'm going to answer those questions and I'm going to explain what they're telling you just isn't the whole story and most importantly for the students of my MS-600 exam prep course, you're going to get some guidance regardless on what stage you're in if you're preparing to take the exam or if you already passed it and are currently certified. So, let's get to it. Now, if you found this video to get the low down on news, then you want the facts. So let's start there. Microsoft's blog post has a lot of information in it about the changes to multiple exams and certifications and the MS-600 exam and the MS-365 Teams Developer Certification. That's just a part of it. So let me summarize it to save you some time. On February 1, 2023, Microsoft Learn announced on their blog that the MS-600 exam and the associated certification that you get when you pass the exam, which is the Microsoft 365 Certified Teams Application Developer Associate Certification, those are going to be retired on March 31, 2023 and that means that on March 31st of 2023, that is the last day that you can take the MS-600 exam. Not just register for it, but you have to take it by the end of that day. Now one exception to this is if you work for a company that's part of the Microsoft Cloud Partner Network and if you're a cloud partner, you can get a special code from your partner portal to register for the exam until December 31st of 2023. Now regardless of how you take the exam, if you pass it, you achieve the certification and it's valid for up to a year. Now if you've already achieved the certification, it's going to remain on your transcript and furthermore, you'll have the ability to take the renewal exam, which is a smaller exam than the MS-600 exam, until January 2024. Wait a minute, that's what the picture says, but the fact below the picture says six months after the December 31st 2023 retirement. Uh, let's see, checking my notes, yeah. I know only a subset of even Microsoft people use Bing, but even Bing says six months after December 31st 2023 is June 30th of 2024. So that's quite a contradiction. I've asked for clarification, so we'll have to see what they say. If I get an answer, I'll mention it in a pinned comment below the video. Now I'm assuming that the renewal is good for a year, so what happens after that year? I assume it's just going to show as retired on your certification transcript, just like my old MCDBA certification from 20 plus years ago as it does today. Now why is Microsoft doing this? Now in the post they say, and I'm quoting here, we heard from learners and organizers that the certification should be better aligned with current needs, and right now the measured skills are too specific and are covered by other roles. To focus on developing the right experience, we'll retire the certification and the corresponding exam. So I've covered the facts and the impact of the retirement decision by Microsoft Learning. What's next for Microsoft 365 developers? Are we going back to the pre-2019 days of no certification? Well, that's unclear, because all Microsoft has said in their post is, the future of work is fluid and dynamic and cloud powered. Uh, okay, great, but what does that mean? What's this new experience you refer to? No clue. They haven't elaborated on any of that yet, so we don't really know what that is. But according to the sources that I've talked to at Microsoft Learning, it seems that they haven't talked about it because they don't know either. So it sort of makes sense why they're being so vague at this point. Now do you wonder why Microsoft even created the MS600 exam and what's behind their thinking and retiring the exam just three years after launching it? Now look, at the risk of boring some of you, let me talk a little bit about the history of this exam and certification both from a public and behind the scenes point of view. If you're not interested in this part and you're a student of mine in the MS600 exam prep course that I have, you can skip ahead using the chapter links at the bottom of the video to jump to the next section of the video where I explain how this retirement is going to impact you and what my plans are for the course. Now let me be absolutely clear at this point in the video. Up to this point, I've only covered facts and no opinions, but what follows is a mix of facts, my experience in working with Microsoft Learning and my opinions. The MS600 exam and the associated certification was creative response to customer demand. For a few years, Microsoft has been pushing the idea of a Microsoft 365 developer at their conferences and in their marketing, but customers were left asking, so what makes someone a Microsoft 365 developer and other questions like, how do we identify candidates as a Microsoft 365 developer and evaluate their skills? So Microsoft created a certification, the Microsoft 365 certified developer associate, to answer this customer request. The idea at the time was that it would measure developer skills on five different workloads that they defined as being core Microsoft three developer skills, things like Microsoft identity, which really meant Azure AD, Microsoft Graph, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, and Office Addends. Now if you want to learn more about how they created this exam, check out my video that I'll link to here where I went behind the scenes as I was deeply involved in this process along with a lot of other people throughout 2019. But in my opinion, initially this was way too broad of an exam to adequately test your knowledge of being a Microsoft 365 developer. Each of those workloads is pretty big. How can a single exam with a two hour time limit measure someone's knowledge? And while we did the best we could at creating the exam, I still think it seemed like it was flawed to me. Each exam usually has an instructor led course that Microsoft offers at the same time, but the course that they created was supposed to teach developers not only what they needed to know, but the topics that they'd be tested on was also captured just five days long. So you're telling me that I can take a developer, send them to a class, and in five days they know Azure AD, Microsoft Graph, SharePoint framework, Microsoft Teams app dev, and how to create Office Addends? Would you trust your enterprise app using that model? Maybe if they stated a holiday and expressed the week of the class, but I'm just joking, never mind. Microsoft even asked me to create the course, but only gave me three weeks to do it because they had to have the course go live with the exam announcement. Yeah, well, I passed on that opportunity. All that being said, that's why I created my exam prep course with a different approach. I didn't want to teach you everything, but instead, I wanted my course to be more of a guide telling you what you needed to know, what to focus on, and what you could avoid. And then I also included free resources that you could use to prepare for the exam. And it was working great. Hundreds of students were passing the MS-600 exam using my exam prep. But it seems Microsoft wasn't too happy with the way things were going with the exam and the certification. Customers weren't registering for the exam and being certified in the numbers that Microsoft had hoped for. And to me, this made sense. The companies that I talked to told me that the reason they weren't sending people to get certified or making a requirement for job applications to be certified is that they thought the candidates that they were getting using this criteria were too light on all the workloads. Now, the word associate in the certification in Microsoft Learning terminology, that means that someone has the equivalent of four years of experience and can not only design a solution to a business problem, but also implement the solution on their own. Maybe these candidates were good SharePoint framework developers, but they didn't have Azure AD or Teams experience or vice versa. It makes sense. Two hours of a multiple choice questions on an exam used to determine that someone has four years of experience on five big workloads? No surprise there, it's not working. So either to fix the little registration numbers for the MS-600 or to promote their marketing messages to promote Microsoft Teams app development. In the fall of 2022, they released a big change to the exam and the certification. It was now a Microsoft Teams app developer cert. They took what they had with the current MS-600 exam, cut office add-ins to make some room, added some generic questions for app dev and testing and added more of an emphasis on Microsoft Teams. And after doing that, they said they started getting feedback from customers that some of the areas of the exam are better covered by other roles or other exams, presumably workloads like SharePoint, Azure AD, Microsoft Graph, and others. That's the thing that I mentioned earlier in this video, why they said that they were retiring it. It's funny, right? It seems to me that they put themselves in this situation and all the while customers were giving the same feedback. At least that's what I was hearing from the ones that I was talking to. So I have to assume and hope that they were sharing the same things with Microsoft if Microsoft learning was really soliciting and collecting feedback. When it comes down to it, people weren't registering for the exam and the numbers that Microsoft had hoped. Because in my opinion, the whole point of this was flawed from the start. It's classic product development, solve a customer problem. They said give us a tool to adequately measure and quantify a candidate skill set as a Microsoft 365 developer, and they weren't doing it. So now they claim the measured skills are too specific for teams at depth. So they're retiring it and replacing it with something new. And as I said previously, whatever that something is, we still don't know. It's they still haven't articulated it. So what does this mean for my exam prep course? And what does it mean for my current and my past students? Well, personally, I'm extremely disappointed with such short notice on the retirement. Not just as someone who's selling a course, but Microsoft is really giving developers less than two months notice on this very significant change. If you're enrolled in my MS 600 exam prep course currently, I strongly encourage you to take your exam by March 31st of 2023. And if you're an employee of a Microsoft Cloud partner, you've got a little bit longer. You've got until December the 31st of 2023. So what about the course? I'm going to continue to sell the course through the public retirement of March 31st of 2023. But at that time, I'm going to retire the course and pull it from the Voitano store. If you're an active student of the course, you still have access to the content. Now, note that when you enrolled, it granted access to the course for three months and then started a $50 a month automatic subscription once the 90 days access was over. You can cancel this automatic payment at any time in your account on your own. However, once the course is pulled from the store on March 31st 2023, I'm going to terminate all the automatic subscription charges so that you're not going to be charged again. And then one month later on April the 31st 2023, the course is going to be pulled from the course library. So yeah, it's disappointing, but I can't say I'm all that surprised by this decision. Honestly though, I'm really disappointed that the official statement about why Microsoft Learning is retiring the MS-600 exam is a little disingenuous in my opinion. But I guess it's not surprising to put some marketing spend on some bad news. So in conclusion, I really want to thank all of my students who trusted me with helping you prepare for the MS-600 exam through my prep course. What's the future going to hold with this exam and the certification? We just don't know what that is, that story is yet to be written. If you've got a question or a comment about anything that I've covered, please post it in the comments below the video. So until next time, see ya.