 Hello everybody. This is our last day of our webinar series that we're doing here on getting certified in the Microsoft 365 certification exam. If you wouldn't mind, if you just give me just two, just give me one quick check here, just raise your hand on the Zoom call, just make sure you can see and hear me, actually call that my team's check. No, it's good. Okay, we can go ahead and you can go ahead and put your hands down. All right, sweet. So today we are going to have a chat and it's going to be a little bit different than the ones we've done so far in this webinar series. I started doing this webinar series three weeks ago, three Tuesdays ago actually. So it's been a while we've been doing this. And it's all been about the Microsoft 365 certified developer associate exam certification and the associated exam, the MS 600. Today's webinar is a little bit different, right? So in the past, we've gone through the five different workloads over the last three weeks. I will have a link to for you in just a minute where you can go take a look at all the recordings if you have not been able to tune in to all of them or some of them. But in this one, what we're gonna do today is we're gonna kind of go behind the scenes. I'm gonna tell you a little bit about what it was like. Maybe we've done a little bit of this in different places throughout the webinar series, but I thought, hey, let's take a minute and let's actually show you a little bit, talk to you a little bit about what's happened behind the scenes. You gotta love it just on a little personal level. This has been fun to do these and to see everybody's interest. And I will tell you it's been, this last one's been a little bit stressful as all of us are doing the work from home thing. Things are a little bit different. It's not too much different for me because this is what I always do. I always work from home and I have my home office set up and a pretty nice set up here. I've got my toys behind me as well to keep me distracted. It is a bottle of champagne behind me, but that's from a celebration from a big milestone we have with work. So that's, it's empty. It's not recently empty. It's empty from years ago. But yeah, it was a little stressful on this one. Last night, we all of a sudden lost internet access and I put something in the chat. I'll put it in there again in case people are just joining us. So I'm an AT&T customer for our internet. I live in Northeast Florida and I, last night all of a sudden stuff started getting slow. Of course, you find out first from the kids complaining, hey, YouTube's not working. Hey, the Xbox isn't working. And it's like, nope, those are all working just fine. I go to look at it and say, sure enough, it looks like the internet's out and they go do a couple more checks and it ends up somebody, some guy with a backhoe doing road works, cut the cable, cut the main fiber cable coming into Florida for AT&T. And that not only affected internet customers, it also affected mobile customers as well. And a little bit more research and I finally got to go check it. When you go look on the AT&T app, find your customers, it said it was gonna take 26 and a half hours to fix. And that was at seven o'clock my time last night and it is now 11 a.m. the day after. So I was like, this webinar may not happen. So hopefully you can see me, hopefully it's coming across just fine. Everyone said it was fine. The internet, the service isn't as good as it normally is. But thankfully we don't have any demos and we're just doing stuff like this. And the rest of my family is under instructions to not do any streaming stuff. So at any rate, let us do quickly dive into just talking a little bit about the webinar and let me just kind of set the stage for some stuff first. So, why are my slides not advancing? Oh man, just one second. Hold on one sec, my slides are not advancing. There we go, now they are. All right, so my name is Andrew Connell. I am a MVP for, I'm an MVP for Office Development. I'm also a member of the Patterns and Practices Core team for the Microsoft 365 Group or Microsoft 365 Development. And been doing SharePoint Development for a very long time and as I'll explain, I was also involved quite a bit last year in the certification. I've got a podcast at co-host with a guy named Chris Johnson and I also have a training business where I focus on SharePoint framework and really focus on Microsoft 365 Development topics. Now, really quick, let me just tell you a little bit about the exam and about the certification and a little bit about how I kind of played into it. And we're gonna spend most of the time in this webinar. I've got a couple topics that I can run through but I'm really here to answer just your questions. So if you've got questions, there's a QA manager inside of the Zoom webinar, Zoom Client, I'd encourage you to use that. You can use the chat as well because I'm not doing as much of a presentation today and it's gonna be more of just kind of off the cuff sharing with you the experience. I do have an outline of things that I would like to go through but it really is primarily for you to answer any questions that come up. And, but let me first kind of explain the exam and stuff like that to you how this whole thing is set up here. So the Microsoft 365 certification, yes, so I saw one question. This will also be posted with all the other recordings. I'm treating this, it's a six webinar series. We've done five of them, this is the sixth one. This one will also be posted, the recording will also be posted. So yes, good question, Ralph. It'll be included with all the other ones. Set up in the exact same way, same place, same bat time, same bat channel. So the Microsoft 365 certification and associated exam are there to test and make sure that you are at a certain level with the five different workloads or five primary workloads for Microsoft 365. These include two fundamental ones that are not technically Microsoft 365 but are core to 365. And that is Microsoft identity and as we talked about in the very first webinar, I actually did webinars on all five of these and we did them all around in this order. So starting at 12 o'clock, we did the Microsoft identity, which is really Azure AD. We talked about what you needed to know, what was important to know, what things you could avoid, stuff like that. We then talked about Microsoft Graph and again, same topics, what you need to know, what you can avoid, what's important, what's not important, et cetera. And then we also talked about SharePoint. What things did you need to know related to SharePoint, SharePoint framework, what you didn't need to know. Then we did Teams. And then earlier this week, we did Office Add-ins as well. And I know we got, this week is also the Microsoft Build Conference, which I know a lot of people tuned in for. Unfortunately, I scheduled this before we knew when the dates were for build and I had already put out a lot of the scheduling times and everything and then they announced all the timing stuff with build and then of course, they didn't check with me about when was a good time for me to do this. Ha, yeah, right, they would check with me on this. But that's okay. That's why, one of the reasons why I recorded it so everybody could get to it. So hope everybody, when you've not been tuned into our webinars, hope you've been enjoying build this week. It's been an interesting experience. But anyway, so we did, so we talked about all these different workloads and these workloads are the ones that you are tested on. Now, why should you listen to me on this? Well, or why should, what's my involvement with this? Well, I'm gonna go into that in a little bit. But I was involved quite a bit with the Microsoft 365 group in both defining the things that you were gonna be, that you needed to know for certification, but also in defining what would be, what you would be tested on, what you would, what would be on the exam. And I was also involved in a couple other areas. I've also taken the exam. I took the beta version of the exam, which was available back in January. It was available like in December of 2019 and January of 2020. And there was a bunch of, what was it? There was a bunch of people that were, they had a bunch of slots, I should say. It wasn't like a private thing. It was a public beta. And they offered it to people to take it at a very deep discount, something like 80% off the normal registration price. But it took us a long time to get our results. Usually you get your results like the right when you finish it. I took mine on January the 3rd that you see there on the slide. And I didn't get my results until, I think like late March or early April. One of something like, or something maybe even mid April, something like that. It took a long time to get my results. But I'll explain why when we do the, how they do all this stuff. It'll make sense. You can see here, it's a full breadth of all these different things you can actually be tested on. And the, let's see. And you can just see, just showing you how I did on it. Okay. So I've talked about that multiple times throughout the previous webinars. Really quick. This will give you some context if you've missed any of the other ones. What is it? How do they test you on this stuff? So, you know what? Let's come back to this in just a minute. Is that wanna get out? I wanna get out of this and we'll come back to the slides in a minute. Okay. So if you missed any of the previous webinars that we've done, there is a link at the bottom of this slide where you can get access to any of the webinars that we did. So it's all, well, we, I did, that are all listed in the bullet points above. So I've got all of those. They're all available on demand. You can watch them whenever you like. And they're all set up. They're all linked in separate pages, but they're all on that, they're all linked on that one page that you see listed there at the very bottom. That'll redirect you to a blog post that will take you to the master list of and where you can get to each one of the different recordings here. So, let me, let me first kind of explain the exam itself. And I got, I see one question coming. I got one thing from the chat. So let me come back. Come back to those in just a minute. Let me do this next slide for a second because then I want to get off of this and we're just going to go with the camera. We're just going to have a conversation. Okay. And I run through the different topics I want to talk about. So in the, the way Microsoft was testing everybody, the way Microsoft's learning tests everybody for your skills level is they look at it from three different levels. You've got your foundational level, you've got an associate level and you have an expert level. And what they, the way they look at it, part their definition, part my definition is that a foundational level person is somebody like a technical sales person. They can talk the talk and explain what kinds of things you can do with the technology and they can maybe design a solution to something you're trying to achieve in your business. And they can do that like on a whiteboard or on a piece of paper or on their iPad or whatever. But they may not have the technical chops or experience to be able to implement it. And they haven't, they don't have experience with the technologies and know that, you know, if you make this decision then that means that you have to, you will be limited in this way or vice versa. An associate level person is someone who has the equivalent of four years of experience in the technology and they should be able to be turned loose and implement any kind of a solution that they build. The, when I say you have to be, have four years of experience, that's kind of a loose thing because Microsoft Teams and SharePoint framework, they haven't been around for four years and you are tested on both of those things. So it's the equivalent of four years of experience. That's the level they're looking for. An expert is somebody who can teach people to become an associate level kind of background. The certification is aiming to measure people at that middle level, that associate level. So we had a question in one of the other webinars where someone said, if I go through the foundational learning material that Microsoft provides, is that enough? And my answer was absolutely not. That you will not be enough for you to pass the exam. You need a deeper knowledge of that stuff. You need to understand the APIs. Now, how do you achieve that certification? You achieve that certification by, think of that as like the trophy for passing the exam. And the exam is the MS-600. It's called Building Applications and Solutions with Microsoft 365 Core Services. And that's the link that you see there on the top of the slide. So what you're gonna be, what you have to do is you have to pass the exam with a 70% or higher of all the questions that are being presented to you. So let me, there's a couple of things that I wanna run through today that I thought you would find interesting that, and again, feel free to ask any questions that you've got or put them in the, I'll try to keep an eye on the chat, but the QA manager is gonna be the best way to do it. If I can actually, the QA manager is getting overlapped by something here. This is hard to see it. Let me move it around. Okay. So let's see, I got one question here and one question in the chat. So one question from Michael, he says he's looking here. So it's a specific URL. You'll see that in a second. You don't see the learning paths for office add-ins or teams. Do those exist? Yes, they exist. You probably would have to search for them. If they haven't updated the site, then that's something you're gonna have to search for. They do exist because as I'll explain in a minute, I wrote them. And so they are there and they have been published. I just, I don't know the URLs off the top of my head. And a little bit later, I can pull them up if you haven't found them, but they are available on MS Learn. Let's see, Ralph had a question. If you're on the M365 virtual dev day next week, let us know what your slot is or slots are kind of virtual and other are kind of virtual. I already on the slide coming. Oh, okay. So yeah, there's a, I assume you're referring to what is it called? The Microsoft 360 or now they're calling it M365 virtual marathon or virtual Olympics or something like that. It was supposed to be like a stand-in for the missing, there you go. So to the last question, what is it from Michael? Somebody's posting the link to the teams and it looks like they're gonna find the other one in the chat as well. So you can, to the office add-ins, you'll find that as well. I was posting all of them. Okay, there you go. So yeah, so that's supposed to be like a virtual conference that's like, I think it's two days long or a day long or something like that of just a bunch of recordings. I'm not involved with it. I don't have any sessions with it. I'm curious to see how it ends up going, but I just wasn't, I didn't get involved in this one. Okay, so let me tell you a little bit about the exam, how Microsoft goes about creating these because I think I've always, I always think like with anything that you have to learn, anything like, especially on the technical side, but it really applies to so many different things. I think it also includes on taking the exam. And I think it always helps if you have an understanding about what, either why, what the motivation is behind somebody doing something or how they went about it. You have a little bit better perspective on how it works or what the training is or something like that, okay? So like for example, like I teach the SharePoint framework and one of the first things that I do when I teach it is I always explain, here's what Microsoft's motivation was for releasing the SharePoint framework because if you are trying to do something with it that does not fit what their motivation was and what they were trying to achieve, then, and you're gonna get frustrated like it doesn't do this, it doesn't do this. I can't do a custom timer job or I can't do, I can't do a workflow. It's like it wasn't designed for that. And so if you, if you understood what they were trying to achieve, then you would understand like, well, that's probably not the tool that I wanna use for this. And it's kind of like buying a car. If you wanna go racing in a car, you're probably not gonna buy a gigantic, one of those big gigantic Ford pickups, right? Because it's just not made for that. And so if you're like, I wanna be able to, go 150 miles an hour and get on the high banking and have really good agility and all that stuff. And it's like, okay, because yeah, I have a Ford, I don't know, I don't know the trucks, but like F550, whatever. It's like, okay, but you're not gonna get that. You probably wanted to buy like a Mustang or you wanted to buy like a Porsche or you wanted to buy something that's more built for like racing. I wanted to take it out on the beach and go like, go through the dunes, like going, you shouldn't have bought that Porsche. You should have bought something that's like a pickup truck or you should have bought, stuff like that. If you understand why it's built, it helps. So the first thing I wanna run through is how, what was my involvement and how do we make it? And it's kind of, I can easily share with you like, how did all of this come about? Because I was involved in this last year. I didn't see one question come in from Jim. So are there any questions on the exam around Azure functions or power automate within the boundaries of SharePoint? The answer is absolutely not. There is nothing that is not, there are no questions that are, that are not core to the tech that is being used. So unless you have to use it, it will not be, it's not something you need to know. So like for example, SharePoint framework, can I use Azure functions? Yes, can I do power automate? Yes. Are those SharePoint related topics? As far as exam goes, no. You don't have to know those. You don't have to know power automate to be considered a SharePoint like associate or have SharePoint knowledge. Another good example, let's look at Teams. Do I need to know things about in Azure to be able to use Microsoft Teams? Well, not really, but kind of because you're gonna have to create a bot if when you do like messaging extensions or bots. And when you do those, you are gonna be creating a resource using the bot framework, which is an Azure resource. And then you're also gonna be creating a Azure app ID. And that is an Azure resource as well. I mean, technically it's an Azure AD resource which doesn't have to be in Azure. Well, it is an Azure, but there's a whole, kind of Azure AD is treated a little bit differently. But you don't, you would need to know those parts of Azure, like the bot framework stuff. And at least as how it relates to Teams, the Azure AD stuff went in the team section. You need to understand that in terms of registering an app. But over in the identity section, and you would need to know the part of Azure AD about single tenant, multi-tenant apps, the different types of authentication. I mean, stuff that you would need to know for Azure AD, but you don't need to know Azure functions. You don't need to know web apps, stuff like that, databases, et cetera. Okay, so let me explain a little bit. And I'm gonna really open up the Komodo here and really share with you guys, like here's what my involvement was, here's where it was not. I'll tell you exactly why I wasn't involved and how I was involved in the whole thing. So the way that Microsoft made this whole, the way that they make a certification, you have one or more exams. And those exams are, you have to, those exams, once you pass those exams or that single exam, however many they have, you then are rewarded with a certification. So passing the exams is how they test you. And then once you pass a certain number of them, you are then rewarded with a certification. In the case of this one that we're talking about, the M365 Associated Developer, you only have to pass that one exam. I will answer that for you in the, in all of this I'm going through right now, Michael, I will answer that question. You'll get the answer to that question. If not by the end of the webinar, definitely ask because you'll get that in a sec. So the way they do this is they have, there's essentially three or you could, maybe three, but I'd argue there's two, there's two main things that they do before they are at a point to where they can start like building the exam and building the, and identifying the cert. The first thing that they do is they do this thing. And I forget exactly what the acronym stands for. I looked for it in my email for about an hour this morning and was unable to find it. I think I remember it correctly. So I may get, I may get the words wrong, but I know it's a JTA. I believe it stood for the joint task or joint team assessment. And so it's either, I know it's joint and then team or task assessment. And what this is, this happened in early June of, or mid June of 2019. And what they did is they brought together a bunch of people from different product groups at Microsoft, so SharePoint teams, the five different workloads that are on the exam, identity, teams, SharePoint, office add-ins and graph. And they brought people from each one of those teams. Sometimes it was one person, sometimes it was like three or four people. And then they brought people from the community. And some of them were people from developers from ISVs. Some of them were people who are just, they have a lot of a community experience, a lot of knowledge. Some of them were community people like MVPs. I was asked to be involved in the JTA from the, primarily from the SharePoint part of you, point of view, but they also had, were able to, I was also able to check the box in terms of being, like what they, they said, identify yourself as an expert. And so I identified myself as an expert in identity graph and SharePoint teams. I was like, ah, there's other people that know a lot more about this than me. So probably should let you rely on those and office add-ins, definitely go find somebody else on that stuff. And so I was gonna be involved in that. And what that entire process, what that was involved with is everyone's sitting around the room for about five intense days in Redmond. And you focus for the majority of each day on each workload. And then there was a time during each one of the days where you kind of like reviewed everything. But so you had things like, like let's just take SharePoint for example. We looked at all the different aspects in SharePoint and we, it was a, but I came up with this giant list that was here are all the development things that you could do and you should, and you, and we, you maybe should know, not definitely have to know, but you maybe should know to be considered someone who you would, you would consider a an associate developer with four years of experience and may able to hit the ground running with no assistance for doing a SharePoint customization project. And again, the focus is on SharePoint online, not SharePoint on-prem. So we had a very long list for that and we did it for teams and we did it for identity and we did it for graph and we did it for office add-ins. That generates a very long list. And it was a very interesting thing because there's a lot of like negotiating, I didn't, you know, having to come up with like a schema for like what do you consider a certain level of knowledge? And as we were doing this, we had to say like, you know, this is something that you should know at like a foundational level and then an associate level or do you need, do you need to know this? And we had to, we had to rate everything that we did. And so there was a lot of times, probably the most interesting part that we saw with this was that there were a lot of times where the community would, the community people had a strong opinion on something and the engineering team at Microsoft had a strong opinion. They're like, you absolutely have to know this. And everybody in the community is like, you don't have to know that at all. That I mean that in the real world, nobody uses that. And there was a lot of debate on some of those things. I don't want to say it was a heated debate but there were a lot of passions that were in there. It was interesting. Now, I was supposed to be involved in the JTA and I actually had to back out of it like the day before I was supposed to fly out because this was like two weeks after the SharePoint conference that I had just presented a whole bunch at the SharePoint conference last year, last May and it was in Las Vegas. It came out of Vegas just like every single time with a head cold and you've got the Vegas head after Las Vegas. Like just the junk, the congestion and all that stuff. And for me, it turned into a full blown sinus infection. And the day before I was supposed to fly out, it was really bad. And I was like, I don't know if I should get on a plane and fly. I live in Northeast Florida. So it takes me five hours to get to, well, it takes me an hour to get to Atlanta and takes another four hours to fly over to, from Atlanta over to Las Vegas. And oh my goodness, I was already in pain just thinking about being on a plane with the pressure. I was like, this isn't gonna work. This is gonna be even worse. Plus I was coughing up a storm. So that wasn't gonna, it wasn't gonna work. So I had to bow out of it. They did create for those of us who were not able to join in person, there was a team's meeting that was set up. And so we were able to kind of dial into it. It wasn't, I wasn't able to participate as much as we were all hoping that the remote people were able to. Instead it was just able to chat because the room was just, there was a lot of conversations going on. And of course you couldn't hear what somebody far away was saying, but it was important and you couldn't ask them to restate everything. And so, but at any rate, that whole JTA process, that generated a gigantic spreadsheet. All right. And so that entire spreadsheet was, it had a lit, it was like the manifest. It was like the entire manifest of here's everything that you could possibly know. And it's pretty good. They sent that out to the engineering teams and then they sent it out also to the people who were involved in the community bit. And we all reviewed it independently over the course of a week or two and came back and had our own edits. Like, here's what's not important. Here's what it is important. You know, the goal of that review was really to make any significant objections or identify significant omissions. From that, there was a bit of a review that happened internally at Microsoft and what things you do and don't need to know. And then a couple, about a month later, there was something called the OD meeting. And that was, I believe it was two days. I believe it was two full days. It might have been one day, but I think it was two full days. This one I was involved with in person and this is a much smaller group. This was about, this was like one person from each one of the product groups. So we have one person from teams, one person from graph, one person from identity, one person from office add-ins, and one person from SharePoint. And then there were one, two, three, four, five, six or so people, maybe seven, people from the community. I was one of those that was in the room. And then there were, there was somebody from Microsoft Learning or a worldwide learning, I think it's the group inside Microsoft and they're responsible for the certification exam. And there was somebody from the Microsoft 365 dev team. And then there was, there was actually there was one or two people from the Microsoft 365 dev team. And then there was somebody else that came in from learning that I'll tell you about in a minute. She provided some really insightful stuff. Now, the goal of that whole process of the OD was to take that giant spreadsheet that we had and to do a couple of things with it. So first of all, we had to identify what the training was like, right? Or what the certification should be like. And it was, okay, you need to be tested on these five workloads. Now, there was a little bit of a debate in the whole thing about like, is everything gonna be tested at the associate level? Defining what it means to have the certification. What are the requirements for having the certification? Not from a knowledge perspective, but from a functionality or business perspective. So like for example, when Microsoft does a certification, they always have to have a instructor led training course a Microsoft official curriculum or mock that a Microsoft certified trainer can go teach. So that you could go register for the course and go sit down in person in a classroom for three, four, five days and go through the course. And by the end of the course, be knowledgeable to be able to go take and pass the exam if you applied yourself. There was a lot of discussion around this part. And it was that, I was of the opinion that there was no way that you could test everybody at the associate level for all five of these workloads at an adequate level and say that they were certified and be able to teach them all that stuff in five days. I said, look, just let me talk about SharePoint. It would take me at least three days. I really need, I think I need at least four or four and a half days to teach you SharePoint development to be able to be at the level of an associate developer. And when I say like teach, I mean, it's like lecture nonstop, no labs, just teach, teach, teach, just talking for four days. I'd need at least three days for identity. I'd need at least three, maybe two or three days around maybe probably two days around graph. Teams, you need at least three days. Office add-ins, two, three, four days. And for all of that, I mean, in my mind it was if you're gonna test everybody at the associate level and you have to have a course that people can take, that course is gonna be two or three weeks long. And just from the implementation of that, there's no way anybody was gonna register for that course. So there was no way that they could actually create it because logistically they couldn't offer it. They couldn't sell it. You have to put it into a box. It's not a revenue center for them. They're not gonna make money off the course. It's, but it's something that they have to be able to provide. And asking somebody to sit in the classroom for two weeks to be able to pass this certification is not something they do. They've only done that for what's called, there's a master's certification that used to exist a long time ago. That was a three week course and that was very, very limited. But it was also incredibly expensive too. It was like 20 or $25,000 just for the course itself. It doesn't include the travel and the everything else associated with that. So we had to take the content that was there and we had to kind of like start to kind of identify stuff. And the way we came out of it was, I guess in my recommendation was you need multiple tests. And if you think back to the day, back years ago, like 10, 15 years ago, Microsoft certifications, you could take multiple exams. And like, if you want to become back, what, that's just dating myself. 20 years ago, I think, I was a Microsoft certified DBA, which is so funny to think about now. And in order to get that certification, it was like a college thing. You had to have these two core exams you had to pass. And then you had all these electives you could pass, but you had to have at least these core done and then this many of these electives done and passed. So I was of the mindset with that. I was like, what you ought to do is you ought to have identity and graph be associate level core exams because you have to know those for everything. And then say you have to take and you have to pass two of the other ones, SharePoint teams or office add-ins. There was a lot of debate about it. There was a lot of discussion. I wasn't the only one that thought that. There was a few other people that thought that as well. It came down to a business thing. And it was just that, we don't have the budget for this. We have to launch this at a certain time. And there was a whole timeline. I mean, just business decisions that have to be made and everything. And so the way it came out was that the SharePoint and the teams and the office add-ins content was supposed to be tested at kind of like a foundational plus level. And then graph and identity was at the associate level. I've mentioned this a couple of times in our previous webinars, but in my opinion, the content on teams, the questions you get on the team section and the SharePoint section are much more at the associate level. I think there are a lot more detail than what we talked about. And I also think that they are more detailed than what you would get if you took the instructor-led course that they offer. Now, that objective domain, that OD, the result of that was not only just identifying, okay, what is the certification? And what is the exam? But it's take that spreadsheet and let's really refine this. Let's think what stuff could you be taught and tested in the case of a week and still be considered that if I was gonna hire somebody that had a piece of paper that said I am an M365 certified dev at the associate level, what did I expect that as an employer? What would I expect that to mean about that candidate? So what do they know and what kind of projects could I put them on? That's what the goal of the certification was. The whole reason Microsoft created the certification was based on customer demand and customers asking Microsoft for a way to be able to measure people who say that they're Microsoft developers, sorry, Microsoft 365 developers. So they needed a piece of paper to prove that and to say, what does Microsoft say that that is? So this was a really intense thing because there was like, I had my iPad out to have the spreadsheet in front of me but I never left the spreadsheet. It was like nonstop discussions. And it was a whole lot of, this you don't need. Very few, this is gonna be for like 20% of people who need to know this. So cut that out, you don't need to know it. But like teams development, you gotta know how to deploy your team solution. You need to be able to know how to build a bot and how to build a task module. Azure AD, you gotta know how to create an Azure AD app, how to create a secret. What differences between single and multi-tenant. You gotta understand how permissions and scopes work with graph. You need to understand what throttling is all about. You need to understand the different permissions that are there. You need to understand that there's an SDK and an arrest API you can use. You need to understand these different endpoints, users, groups and files. We talked about those in the graph webinar because those are the most popular things that graph sees in terms of telemetry. We did the same stuff for office add-ins. So there was a whole lot of that building out, really refining that spreadsheet. And I was taking a look at it. I took a look at it this morning. And I mean, it was really proud of what we came up with. It's like the Bible. It's like a great database of here's everything that you really could know. And there's a lot of stuff that was like, don't need to know this, don't need to know this. Really, really good. I thought it was a really good piece of work. That went, when we were done with that, that spreadsheet, it then went through a couple more internal revisions at Microsoft. And then we all got to review it again remotely. But that spreadsheet turned out, that spreadsheet was the result of all those meetings, the JTA and the OD, and all these different discussions. So it's probably the result of about two weeks of work from about 15 to 25 people, right? So those are really, I'm proud of what we came up with. I mean, of course there's stuff that you would love to have in there and that you don't think should be in there, but you had a difference of opinion, but overall I thought it was fantastic. This spreadsheet is, I'll be honest, that's the thing that you really, you guys wish you could get your hands on. You can't. It's an internal asset from Microsoft, but that thing is awesome. But what they did is they used that spreadsheet to then go create three bodies of work. And so we kind of went, we went JTA and then we went OD and then from there we take that spreadsheet and we go off and, how do I do this? There, I don't have enough hands, one of three ways, okay? So the spreadsheet was given to the team that was writing exam questions and their job was to go write questions that were about the things that were listed on that spreadsheet, okay? That spreadsheet was also given and they would build like a pool of questions. That spreadsheet was also given to, I think it was a team or I'm not sure who, but it was given to one or more people to go write the instructor-led course for that I referred to earlier. And then the spreadsheet was also given to somebody else, but it was me, they gave it to me to go build all of the self-paced training content or self-paced learning content. And like the links that were shared in the chat earlier, these are the learning paths and all the modules in those learning paths that are published on the Microsoft Learn website, docs.microsoft.com slash learn. And the five different learning paths that we have, one for identity, one for graph, one for SharePoint, one for Teams and one for Office add-ins, all the ones at the associate level, those five learning paths were built and that Excel spreadsheet was used as the spec. So that's why you guys have, when we've done these other webinars and people said, well, how is the best way to study for this? I was like, well, you can always go take the exam, but those learning paths, I find that to be a great, it's a lot of content, but I find that to be, if you go through all those learning paths and you walk away from that and you can honestly say, I've got a really good grasp on this. I know all of this stuff. Then I would say you're in really good shape for going and taking the exam and passing it. So I was involved in, like I said, the JTA, the OD, the JTA kinda, because I got sick and I couldn't be there, but then I was involved in the OD and then I was involved in building the self-paced training content. I was not involved in writing or reviewing any of the exam questions. I was not involved in the building the instructor leg course and to be completely transparent with you guys. I was not involved in writing the questions because there was a part of the contract that was effectively said that if you did this, that if you write exam questions for the certification, I'm prohibited from building and selling training materials on topics that are covered by the questions. So I mean, there's two parts to this I found that was kind of funny and it got in a whole debate with Microsoft Legal about it too. I was like, just let's make sure we're cool and make sure I understand this before you guys and make sure you understand what you're asking me. The part that I found that was kind of, that was like, there's no way I can do this is they, as I mentioned earlier, I have a SharePoint framework online video course, that I've built this 30, 40 some odd hours of content that I've been selling for the last two years. And I checked them, like, so I already, I have a course I've been selling and if I write the questions, it's gonna be about SharePoint framework stuff. So it's gonna, I would be in direct conflict with myself. And they're like, yeah, you can't do that. You can't do that in the past or in the future. I'm like, I can't do it in the past. I've already done it. So we got this whole debate and they're like, yeah, you can't do that. I'm like, well, there's no way I'm gonna, I couldn't go through and continue to build courses and sell them. And I'm like, okay, that's not gonna happen because that's my living. The other part that I found that was really funny about it though is not only was I not allowed to build that stuff and to sell it like, like to people like you guys that are watching the webinar or to my customers, but I wouldn't be able to do that even for Microsoft because they would technically be a customer I'd be selling a course to. And so at the same time, they're asking me to write the questions they're also asking me to do the self-paced content and hiring me to write all the self-paced content for them. And I'm like, but this says I can't do that. So if I do the exam questions, I can't do that. And they're like, hmm. So I was kind of like, I think you guys need to talk because this doesn't make sense. And sure enough, they went into it and they're going, yeah, if you do one, you can't do the other. And I was like, okay, you were also asking me to build the instructor like course as well. And they're like, yeah, yeah. And I'm like, doesn't that apply as well if I do the exam questions? And they're like, yeah, you can't do that either. So if I write the exam questions, you knock yourself out of not only doing the other two, but you also knock out the, for any of the stuff I was going to do for my own business. Like I wouldn't even be able to build like a workshop and go present it at a conference if the conference was going to pay me for it. Or like some of the conferences they pay you to do a workshop, some conferences don't pay you. Some conferences pay you like a little bit per person that sits in each one of the workshop seats. And then some conferences just give you like a flat kind of like, you know, we want you for the whole day to present this topic. And I wouldn't be able to do that. So it was just, it was amusing to me. The, I wasn't involved in the instructor led course, again, to be completely transparent because the timeline that they had to have the course built and available for people to purchase or available for them to review and then to be able to make it for available for purchase. I thought their timeline was unattainable. I know how long it takes to write a course and I know how all the content that was going to have to be in that course. And I, there was no way that that was going to be able to happen, that I was going to be able to get it done in the amount of time that they asked to get it done. So it was just, it wasn't, I turned it down. I was like, you guys are crazy. You want this entire thing built in two weeks or I think it was three weeks. I'm like, this is crazy. This is, this can't happen. You know, it takes, it takes a woman nine months to have a baby. If you put three women on it, it doesn't happen in three months. It doesn't matter how you do it. It doesn't matter how you slice it. It still takes nine months to have a baby. Okay, there's medical things about that, but still generally speaking, nine months to have a baby, right? And that's kind of the way that it was going on with this. So I turned it down. People have asked me in these webinars, would I recommend the instructor led course and I don't want to say I recommend it or I don't recommend it or I like the net, the inverse of recommending it. So it's not like, I don't want to just abstain or say, yes, it's good or no, it's bad. I'd rather say it, let me say it like the following instead of, instead of that, because I don't think it's really fair. I find it very, I know the people who wrote it. And I mean, they're sharp people and I don't want to speak badly of them, but the amount of time that it takes to write a good course, I haven't seen the course. I don't want to see the course because I plan on doing, I'm building something that through Voigtanos and I will do a clean room approach with that. But I frankly don't need to see the course. I don't need to see the course, the questions because I know what that Excel spreadsheet had on it. I know it's important. I know what you need to know. And so, I don't know, I just leave it at that. I'm sure every, if you're joining this webinar, you're a smart cookie. So I'm sure that you, you can read between those lines, wink, wink. Chris has got a question. There are a couple of learning paths on Microsoft 365 identity. Could you point out the one that relates to this exam? And he provides a link. I'm pretty sure that that is the one because that looks like my URL that I created. Yep, that's it. That's the identity one. Let's see. So to that. Okay, so we've got about 11 minutes left. I don't have any questions that are in here right now. If you've got a question, I've got one more thing that I can, two more things I can talk about, kind of briefly, if you don't have any questions, but I wanna make sure that you have questions, go ahead and post them. And I may go in my little, I may run a few minutes over. I may run a few minutes over on the webinar, but it'll be recorded if you have to step away, but I won't go too far. Okay, and actually while I'm doing this, well, yeah, I'll just leave it at that. Okay, so what about taking the exam? What's that like? So it's a really interesting experience. So I took it at home before we had to do everything at home, like in this pandemic we're dealing with now. Although the world is opening up in different degree in different levels. So I'm not sure depending on where you are in the world, you may have the ability to go to a testing center and take it. You're gonna be alone. That's one thing. So you don't have to worry about that side of it. I can't speak to what it is, I can't speak to what it's like when you take it in one of the training centers, one of the testing centers. But when you take it at home, it's an interesting experience. They do a very good job of making sure that you are not cheating and you have no help. They do a very good job that you are not. Keep, you're not trying to copy the questions and take notes and all that stuff on the questions. When you go to take the exam, they tell you all the stuff that you have to do ahead of time. And I did most of it, but I didn't think they were that serious about it. It blew my mind. Your entire desk has to be completely clean within arm's reach. Like completely clean. I had to take the coasters that I have for like my ice water. I had to take, well, your phone can't be anywhere near you. My phone, your phone had to be set way off out of arm's reach. Your camera and your microphone have to be turned on because they want to be listening for you to be speaking like if you were gonna have a recording device in the room and you're gonna be recording the questions as you were talking out. There were a couple of questions that were a little complicated. And I'm sitting there looking at the screen and I was reading it out to myself out loud. It's just one of the ways I think when I'm confused on something. And the proctor came up on the exam and he's like, you have to be quiet. You can't say anything or we'll invalidate the exam. Like I was mumbling to myself. He's like, yeah, you can't do that. Before you start the exam, your webinar, your camera, you have to take your camera and you have to point it at your desk. So like literally I had to go like this, pointed at my desk, right? I had to point at my desk and I had to pan it back so they could see my entire desk and see that I didn't have anything notes or any cheating thing here. You had to take the camera, you had to take your phone and you had to take a picture all the way down where your feet are and stand over here. It was kind of hard to stand against the wall and take a picture this way of your desk, stand over there, take a picture this way of your desk, go behind your desk and take a picture this way from your desk, take a picture that way. And they wanted to see your entire room of where you were taking the exam to make sure that there was nobody else in there and there was nothing cheating. They wanted to see under my desk. Before I started the exam, I had to hold my hands up and go like this, like a car dealer in Las Vegas, to show them I didn't have anything written down on my hands. I had to take my watch off because it was a smart watch and I had to leave it way off to the side. I had to take my second monitor off my desk. I have two monitors set up. I had to disconnect one of them and go put that way over out of the way of my room, out of the way of my reach. It was crazy. When you fire up the testing app, it goes full screen. My recommendation, don't have any external monitors up. I have like a widescreen, like a 34 inch curved monitor on my desktop. That was a royal pain because they, my camera is set like off center on one of them. So like the edge of my monitor goes like, right now I'm looking at the edge of my monitor. So you can see how far off my eyes are. The proctors came up a couple of times and were like, you have to look at the screen while you're doing the exam. I'm like, I am looking at the screen. It's my screen reaches all the way over here. And it's like, yeah, there's somebody else in the room. I'm like, no. And I had to take the camera and show them. It would have been so much easier had I just done everything on my laptop and gone full screen on my laptop. Because the other thing too, in the app goes full screen, you've got like the question way off to the side and you got answers way over here. So you're kind of like looking like this if you've got a widescreen. It was challenging. So I would recommend that you, if you can and you do it at home, go to a room that's got like nothing in it. Like if you have a house with like a guest room, usually there's nothing in that room, do it there to where there's no distractions and just do it with your laptop. Don't take a second screen in there. Highly recommend doing it that way. Now the other thing too that they do, and I found this, I actually got a lot of respect for the teams for the team that does this prior to going through this entire process. So I'd say early 2019, I didn't have a very high regard for Microsoft certifications or their exams. I didn't think they did a really good job of testing you. Nor did I think they did a really good job of saying are these good questions or not good questions. Room's got a really good point there too. A meeting room in an office is great for those exams. Like when you have access to a room, agreed. If you work for a company and you're not still forced to work from home, if you can go into, if you can have a conference room and you can have that as your room or an empty office that nobody's using, that's the best option, I think. That's probably the best option. Instead of doing it at home. If I do another one of these exams, I would probably prefer to go into a testing center next time than do it at my house. The other thing that I would, so that when I said, I was talking about like how I, what my attitude is towards these certifications. So get this, even though the exam question writers, like they wrote these questions, and I know some of the people that wrote them and the people that I know that wrote the questions, they know what they're doing, they know what they're doing. But some of the questions that I saw in the exam, which you may get different ones because first of all, there's a pool and plus I took the baton so things may change a little bit based on the feedback they got. I found that some of the questions it's a classic Microsoft certification exam where there were either no right answers or there were multiple correct answers when there was only supposed to be one. And some of it was, it depends. So when you go to take the exam, I would never try to read more into the question. I would always take the question at face value and say, this is all the information I have. And you will have a question where you say, well, if this is true, then this answer is correct. You got to take those things out of your head and you got to assume that you, because you don't have that info, then that's not the case. That would be my biggest recommendation. If you're trying to like say, well, this is true and this is true and this is true, don't play the what if game. It's what is on the screen is the scenario and these are your options. Now I did have feedback for them and I did say, look, there's things on here that I don't think are correct. And I think that the way this question was written was wrong. I gave them all that feedback that was part of my responsibility as being a beta tester. I don't know how they took it into account because there's a really good firewall between the question writers and everybody else. I will tell you that one of the things that they do is when people were taking the beta, they, we did like a survey beforehand and it is self-assess yourself. And so I was like, yeah, I should, I should get every SharePoint question correct. I've been doing this long enough. I've been living SharePoint framework long enough. I should get every question correct. Teams, I should, I should get more than 50% correct. I felt higher than that, but I said I should get 50 and you do that for each one of the workloads. What they would then go back and do is when they would look at my results, this wasn't a person doing it. There was a whole algorithm they run through this and I forget the lady's name but she came in and she explained how they do it and I was like, wow, that is really cool. They will look at the questions and it will tell them that effectively this question may not be a good question because people like Andrew who are getting everything else correct and have said that they know a lot about SharePoint, they're all getting this one question wrong and they're all, and all of those people are getting it wrong, the majority are picking this answer and not this other answer that they should be picking. It's stuff like that. And when they look at it, they're like, that question may be totally accurate but everybody's getting it wrong which means it's a bad question because the people who should be getting it right are not getting it right and so they'll throw it out and they'll make a new question. That process, she explained that process over the course of about an hour and a half and I found it fascinating. I wanted to like grab her ear and like, can you show me how this works? I'm curious but we didn't have the time for it. I found that to be fascinating. So I've got a lot more respect for them on that. When next time you take a certification exam and you're like, these people don't have a clue what they're doing, like they do. And these are like, there's some really good data scientists that are working on this stuff that are trying to figure it out and they can tell you if the question's right or wrong and you can be like, no one's getting this right and they may have the stats going, everybody's getting it right but you. So think twice about that. Okay, so let me see, I got any questions here. How should you clean your laptop? How clean should your PCB by itself? I can't imagine a virtual machine because I have to host it. We can't use a virtual machine, I imagine because I had to host it yet. So it doesn't really matter because the app that you install has to have admin rights on your computer. So Ralph mentioned this in the chat. So you don't have to clean your laptop off per se because the app that runs to give you the test it forces you to terminate every other app on your machine. So you can't have anything running. If you had Outlook up, if you had Notepad up, they won't let, you can't have any of that stuff open and it tells the proctors that you do have stuff open. It's like, here's all the stuff you have open, you have to shut this stuff off. So you don't worry about cleaning it beforehand. You just can't have anything launched. You can't run it from within a VM but even if you had a virtual, you can have a virtual machine on your machine. I mean, I took it from my laptop and I've got, I have a MacBook, so I have parallels installed for a Windows VM and a Mac OS VM. And I was fine having that on there. They weren't running, parallels wasn't running. So, and stuff like that. There were some utility stuff that I had to shut down to. Okay, let's see. Cool. I don't have any other questions from you guys. If anybody's got a question, now's a great time to go ahead and raise your hands. We are one minute past the hour. We've kind of gone maxed out. So if you raise your hand, it just lets me know you're gonna put one in the QA. Thank you guys. Thank you very much for everybody who tuned in for this live, for those of you watching the recording. Thank you very much for watching the recording. I hope you guys got a lot out of this entire series. I hope today was useful. Like, let me know if you thought today was you, actually now, raise your hand if you thought that this was useful today. Did you guys learn something today? Was this beneficial? Oh, sweet. Cool. I thought people would like this. This is like the fun stuff. This is behind the scenes stuff. So, I appreciate those of you tuned in to check out the webinar series. For those of you who are mentioning too, the course I'm gonna do for this, I am looking forward to working on it. I will tell you that part of doing this webinar series was to judge interest, to see if people would be interested in a course. I am pleasantly surprised to see everyone saying that they are interested in it. And it is helping me, it definitely helps with the motivation of pushing through on my other stuff right now that I have to get done before I work on that course. So, it is, it's definitely, I definitely do appreciate it. It's definitely been helpful. So, thank you very much. If you got any questions, each one of these webinars has got a comment feature at the bottom of the blog post that the webinar recording is posted on. Leave a comment. I'm more than happy to respond to you. With that, I'm gonna go ahead and wrap it up. Thank you very much for everybody who attended the webinars. Let me put up that slide one more time so you guys can see the link for the recording. Is it there? Nope, I gotta back up a slide. Those are my notes that I wanted to talk about. There we go. So, that's the link to where you can get the recordings for everything from this webinar series. But with that, I am gonna go ahead and wrap it up. Call today. And I hope everyone, good luck taking the exam if you don't wait for me. For the exam, for my course I'm gonna create. Good luck taking it. Thanks a lot everybody.