 Nearly two years after the initial release of the MS-600 exam, building applications for solutions with Microsoft 365 Core Services, Microsoft released a major update on August 4th, 2022, one that's packed with a ton of changes. Not only did they change the makeup of the exam, but they boosted one workload, cut another, and added two new ones. In the certification that you get once you pass the exam, it changed from being a certified Microsoft 365 developer associate, to being a Microsoft Teams application developer associate. Yep, this is most certainly a Teams developer certification now. I'm currently updating my exam prep course, but I wanted to explain the changes to the exam and how they're going to impact you. That's what this video is all about, so stay tuned. Hey, I'm Andrew, and if you're new here, subscribe to get notified of future videos for professional developers on Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Azure Developer topics. Okay, before we dive into what's changed, let me share with you how I figure out what changes in each of these different updates. This is an exhaustive process, but it's quite comprehensive, so I know that I've covered everything. If you don't care how I do this, feel free to use those jump points in the description below to skip ahead to the sections of the video on the actual changes. When Microsoft originally launched the MS-600 exam in November of 2020, I released an exam prep course that serves as a guide for developers to have the best chance to pass the test. I've included a link to the course in the description below if you want to learn more about my exam prep course. Now, my course doesn't teach you the topics that you're measured on. Rather, it exhaustively explains what you need to know and what you don't need to know, and then I give you a ton of resources to documentation, tutorials, and hands-on labs to learn the topics that you might not have experience with. This way, you don't pay thousands of dollars for an exam prep course when there's a ton of learning material that's available for free. Instead, I'm just going to be your guide to show you where all that stuff is. It also includes over 300 practice questions to help you get ready for the exam experience. Now, when I created the course, I put everything in a Git repository where I can easily track the changes over time. And because Microsoft publishes a skills assessment that lists everything that's covered on the exam, I can treat this like a product spec and I can compare the changes between two different versions. And by the way, you can get a copy of the skills assessment from the link that I've provided in the description below. For example, if I look at my latest commit in the repo, you can see that the changes to the course chapters and the audience profile that Microsoft uses in the skills assessment. Wait a minute, I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's dive into each one of these different changes. Let's start with a summary on what's changed in the August 2022 refresh. The audience profile that Microsoft uses for the exam had some very small changes. Now, strangely, they dropped the word framework from the reference to SharePoint framework, which is odd because the topics in the skills assessment and the questions that I saw on the refreshed exam when I took it were most certainly only about the SharePoint framework. And also notice how add-ins was dropped in the office add-ins reference. Well, they completely dropped the office add-ins workload from the exam. That section made up over 15 to 20% of the questions on the exam. That's a big change. But where did all that extra question space go to? They've not only added two new workloads related to building Microsoft Teams apps, but they also boosted a lot more of the questions in the Microsoft Teams space. Teams now takes up more than one-third of the MS600 exam questions. And that's why I said in my introduction that I think this exam, even if the name doesn't really say it, is not so much about Microsoft 365 development. It's most certainly a Microsoft Teams development exam. Teams now accounts for anywhere from 40 to 55% on all the questions on the exam. And you can even argue that it's more than that. And I'll show you as I go through this video. In addition to reviewing the changes from the skills assessment, I also took the updated exam in early September to get a firsthand look at the changes to the questions from the updated workloads and the new workloads. The updated percentages for how many questions you can expect to receive on each workload that I'll go over in just a minute, they're pretty accurate. The exam was dominated by questions about Microsoft Teams though. But two things stood out to me that I wanted to call out that were different from the first time that I took the exam back in early 2020. First, I was surprised at the number of outdated or inaccurate questions that were on the exam. And let me just give you two examples out of the 44 questions that I had on my exam. I got one question about App Studio. That's the Microsoft Teams app that you can install in Microsoft Teams to create app manifest and design adaptive cards. There was no mention of the developer portal. But what caught me by surprise is that App Studio has reached the end of life and that message is even plastered across the app when you use it today. So why are there even questions about it? Especially when it's been scrubbed from the skills assessment. The other thing that surprised me falls into the same category but to me it's even more egregious because back in October, 2021, nearly a year before the exam refresh, Microsoft dropped the local workbench from the SharePoint framework and version SPFX 1.13 as a way to locally run and test your SPFX web parts. But there was a question on the exam that how you test your SPFX web parts locally. Seriously, you can't do that. It's been removed for almost a year since SPFX 1.13. And there's still a question on the exam about it even though it was scrubbed from the skills assessment. A little weird. These two questions were really big fails here if you asked me. Okay, now what you've probably been waiting for or those of you who have jumped straight to it, let's look at the changes to the different workloads. I'm updating my MS-600 exam prep course to account for all the changes I'm going to cover in the rest of this video. As I finish refreshing a section of the course, I'll publish the changes so students can get the latest information as I have it available. And once everything has been updated, we're also planning to change the course pricing and access details. So make sure you check our site for more details on these changes. There's links in the description below. All right, first up, let's cover the major changes. Now, like I said before, they completely cut the office add-in workload. It used to account for 15 to 20% of the exam, but apparently it's no longer something they consider important with respect to the certification. I mean, I guess that makes sense considering the passing the MS-600 exam means you're a team-certified developer, but still, that's quite a change from before. They've also added two new workloads. The first one they added is called Design Collaborative App Solutions and Existing App Integration. And then the second one that they added is called Test, Deploy, Monitor and Maintain Modern Enterprise Grade App Solutions. Both of these new workloads account for five to 10% of the questions on the exam, respectively. Now let's look at the workload that had the most significant changes, Microsoft Teams. Now, based on what I've said so far in this video, that should come as no surprise to you. First, the entire workload was boosted from taking up 20 to 25% of the exam questions to 30 to 35%, but as we dig into the changes to the skills worksheet, for this workload, you're gonna see it's really much more than that because some of the topics that were considered Teams-specific topics were moved to other sections of the exam. So you can see here that we have things where they dropped about configuring an app manifest from App Studio or the developer portal and they only talk about using the developer portal. I covered that a little bit earlier why it's strange that App Studio is even on the exam. And then how to create an app manifest to deploy a SharePoint framework web part to Teams. That's actually been moved over to the SharePoint framework section, which is what I mean by saying that this question no longer is counted as part of a Teams workload, it's now counted as part of a SharePoint framework workload. Scroll a little bit farther down. We've got things about implementing authentication for a tab. That was moved over to the identity section, we'll see that in a minute. We've added a section here on working with device permissions in a personal tab, creating adaptive cards, creating tabs, we're using adaptive cards. Instead of creating a conversational bot, you see it's now been boosted to say conversational bot, call bot and an online media bots. We have to know all of those things now. They've moved a lot of the, oh, this is another one about implementing SSO for a bot. That was moved over to the identity section. They dropped the section on working with proactive messages with a bot. So that's the ability where we can send like notification or welcome messages. And then they revamped a lot of the Microsoft Teams or the Microsoft Graph related stuff within Teams. Instead, what they've done there is they've moved all that stuff over to the Graph section, which again, those questions don't count as Teams questions, they're counted as Graph questions. So that's why I say that the workload says, it's only 30 to 35% of the changes, but in reality, there's actually a lot more that's related to Teams because I think they're kind of stealing from some of those other sections. And then we have a new section here on creating meeting extensions. And I've got a whole section on that of a module and a bunch of questions that we'll have on the assessment questions for that of stuff that I'm adding to the course. Next up is the Microsoft Identity Workload. In this latest update, Microsoft slashed the coverage in the exam from 20 to 25% down to 10 to 20%. And let's take a look at some of these changes here. So again, they changed the title of it a little bit, not really that big of a deal, although the capital I and identity is all, they're really sticklers about making this sure this is a lower case I, which is interesting, but no big deal. I talked about earlier how the SSO stuff inside Teams for a tab or a bot, that stuff now is gonna be in the identity section, which you can see here. They dropped the part on working with the admin consent requirements. And instead they've gone through and just talked about in general, just specify and implement consent requirements, how to grant consent to an app. They also talk about implementing authorization to expose or consume an API, and then granting permission scopes to an API. And then they've also gone in and just these next two lines here, you see these are relatively small. They've just changed the casing of this. So that's not really a big deal. Couple of little grammatical changes there. That's not important. But here's one that is important here about consuming certificates from Keevol. That wasn't there before, as well as using managed identities. That wasn't there before either. So those are new things that we have to learn about now too. Next up is the Microsoft Graph workload. And in this latest update, similar to the identity workload, Microsoft cut the coverage of the exam from 20 to 25% down to 15 to 20%, not as much as identity. But let's look at some of the changes that they implemented here. So again, a little bit of a name change, not a big deal. There's, we can see our changes here in the percentage of the coverage. And then they really just did a lot of like reorganization of this, where we used to have sections in the graphs about accessing user data, accessing files, accessing group lifecycle. And they really consolidated all of this down to just accessing data. And so they've gotten rid of some of the things that we're gonna quiz us about about those different sections of the teamwork endpoint for Microsoft Graph and just working with Graph. They consolidated it down. So they just kind of said like, create, read an update and be able to delete data from Graph and understanding how to use that. Working with large files and uploading those to teams. One thing that you do see here is they've gotten rid of a lot of the references that talk about the group lifecycle and they've switched it over to the team lifecycle because under the covers teams, a team in Microsoft Teams is really an Office 365 group but they just changed the wording on the exam to make it more focused around teams. This is yet another one of the examples where I say that this is most certainly a team certification. Next up is the SharePoint workload. And in this latest update, similar to the identity and the Graph workloads, Microsoft cut the coverage in the exam from about 20 to 25% down to 15 to 20%. It's also worth noting that they've changed the description of the workload. It was changed to be less about SharePoint and more about using SharePoint to customize Microsoft 365. In other words, this is not just about SharePoint. It's about Microsoft Teams and Viva Connections. So let's take a look at some of the changes they implemented here. So again, you can see the title change from just extend SharePoint to extend and customize Microsoft 365 with SharePoint. Scroll down a little bit farther. We can see that they got rid of using the word web part for designing components and identifying them. They just say, now it's just a solution and they do have a web part in there, but they just changed the casing. So that doesn't really matter all that much. Now they'll just kind of grammatical changes or wordsmithing described, working, getting ready to describe and instead now changing it to explain. See a couple of other things here. Instead of it being, they call it instead of isolated web parts, they now say domain isolated web parts. To me, that's just a marketing thing to be more specific about it. Making sure it's explicit about working with SPFX solutions. They also talk about, again, the rest of it just looks like it's a rust, the rest of it's just generally wordsmithing. But this part right here about manually creating an app manifest to deploy a SharePoint framework web part to Microsoft Teams. That is what I was talking about earlier, yet another example of how they're using the SharePoint section to talk about Teams development, in this case here using the SharePoint framework. So again, that's why before I said, even though the Teams section, they say takes up 30 to 35%, it's really a lot more. You could argue it's a lot more. Well, that brings me to the end of my review for the MS600 changes in August 2022. What do you think about these changes to the MS600 exam and the associated certification? Let me know, drop a comment below and let me know if you've got a question about any of these changes. And if you liked this video, I'd really appreciate it if you've given me a thumbs up and subscribe by smashing that big red subscribe button below the video. So you're gonna see when I publish more videos for professional developers on Microsoft 365, Microsoft Azure, and that includes topics on the MS600 exam. I'll see you in the next video.