Its Day 84 of my 100 Days of Cloud Journey, and last week I sat Exam MS-220: Troubleshooting Microsoft Exchange Online (beta).
The reason I chose to take this exam was that I have a number of years of experience in Exchange Online, both migrating from on-premises Exchange environments, working in hybrid environments and managing full Exchange Online deployments from licensing in Microsoft/Office365 (and BPOS back in the old days!!) right up to mailbox management and compliance.
In this post, I’ll attempt to give an NDA-friendly exam review, and also provide a study guide and useful links to enhance your chances of success in this exam.
Exam Overview
According to the official release article on the Microsoft Learn Blog, the MS-220 exam is aimed at:
Support engineers are professionals who have the energy and expertise to resolve difficult technical issues. They also drive the resolution of highly complex support incidents related to solution-specific development and deployment. In addition to collaborating with other technical specialists on case reviews, troubleshooting, and effective customer interaction, support engineers also:
- Own, troubleshoot, and solve technical issues, using collaboration, best practices, and transparency within and across teams.
- Identify technical or strategic cases that require escalation.
- Create and maintain incident management requests for the product group or engineering group.
- Contribute to case deflection initiatives, automation, and other digital self-help assets to improve customer and engineer experience.
So lets say this straightaway and simplify the statement above – this is a technical exam. It is difficult, and having worked with these technologies for a number of years I can tell you that I found it challenging! Also, because I took it in beta, I don’t know if I’ve passed it yet and like all exams you are never really certain until the screen at the end gives you the result or confirmation email comes in with the beta results.
An NDA-friendly review
I had already tweeted an NDA-friendly thread here, but lets just cover off the highlights and my thoughts on the exam:
- Firstly, the exam is challenging and is true to the exam objectives and learning paths covered by Microsoft Learn. This is not an exam for beginners – I have over 10 years of experience in managing Exchange On-Prem, Online and Hybrid environments and I found this challenging.
- Despite the recent “shift to cloud” that happened last year with the cancellation of Server (MCSE) and Exchange certs, Microsoft clearly feels that there is enough merit to introduce certs that cover hybrid scenarios and follows on from the addition of the AZ800/801 certs.
- The skills measured is fully covered and nicely weighted across the exam.
- The PowerShell on the exam was complicated and it tests your ability to understand the correct command structure to use, while also testing your real-world experience of using PowerShell commands to diagnose the issues presented in the question set.
Study Guide
So lets put together a Study Guide. The first port of call when studying for this exam should be the Microsoft Learn Modules for Troubleshoot Microsoft Exchange Online.
Now, lets look at the skills measured list to see how the exam objectives are weighted:
- Troubleshoot mail flow issues (20–25%)
- Troubleshoot compliance and retention issues (25–30%)
- Troubleshoot mail client issues (20–25%)
- Troubleshoot Exchange Online configuration issues (15–20%)
- Troubleshoot hybrid and migration issues (10–15%)
Lets break down the content in each of these sections and provide links for each of the skills being assessed under each heading:
- Troubleshoot mail flow issues (20–25%)
- Troubleshoot Exchange Online mail flow issues
- review and interpret message headers
- review and interpret message trace results and policies associated with those results
- determine whether a transport rule or conditional routing rule is affecting mail flow
- identify rules that are evaluated and policies that are applied when sending or receiving email
- troubleshoot issues where users cannot send or receive email and no NDR is generated or displayed
- troubleshoot issues where mail destined for one tenant is incorrectly routed to another tenant
- troubleshoot delivery delays
- Troubleshoot mail flow issues with external systems
- Troubleshoot other mail flow issues
- Troubleshoot issues reported by Microsoft Defender for Office 365
- Troubleshoot compliance and retention issues (25–30%)
- Troubleshoot compliance issues
- identify roles required to perform eDiscovery actions
- describe Compliance center retention policies
- troubleshoot eDiscovery issues
- determine what types of holds are associated with an item
- troubleshoot in-place and eDiscovery holds
- search for and delete email messages in an organization
- determine how to clear or purge recoverable item folders
- Troubleshoot retention issues
- describe retention tag types and action
- describe the process for calculating item retention age
- troubleshoot issues creating and applying retention policies
- review and interpret Messaging Records Management (MRM) mailbox diagnostics logs
- interpret message properties used by message records management (MRM)
- Troubleshoot Office Message Encryption (OME) and S/Mime issues
- troubleshoot issues with messages that are not encrypted or decrypted as expected
- troubleshoot issues where external users cannot decrypt messages but internal users can decrypt messages
- troubleshoot issues reading, replying to, or forwarding protected messages from Microsoft 365 on mobile devices
- troubleshoot mail flow rules
- troubleshoot revocation issues for encrypted emails
- troubleshoot S/Mime issues
- Troubleshoot mailbox auditing Issues
- troubleshoot issues searching audit logs
- troubleshoot user actions (for example user reports an item is deleted but they say they did not delete)
- troubleshoot bulk actions including email creation, moves, modifications, and deletion
- track non-owner actions
- troubleshoot audit log retention period issues
- troubleshoot auditing not working
- Troubleshoot journaling
- Troubleshoot mail client issues (20–25%)
- Troubleshoot connectivity and authentication issues
- describe how to obtain Outlook client configuration information
- troubleshoot Exchange authentication policies
- troubleshoot client access rules
- troubleshoot issues with modern authentication
- troubleshoot Outlook on the Web (OWA) sign in issues
- troubleshoot auto-discover issues
- outlook client cannot connect to Exchange Online mailbox
- troubleshoot Outlook continuously asking for Exchange Online password
- Troubleshoot calendaring Issues
- Troubleshoot calendar sharing issues
- Troubleshoot issues with mobile devices
- identify mobile device access states and what the states indicate
- review mobile devices statistics to confirm the reason for a block
- review the Allow Blocked Quarantine (ABQ) list to identify blocked or quarantined devices
- troubleshoot Exchange device access rules
- review and interpret ActiveSync logs to troubleshoot Outlook Sync EAS connection issues
- troubleshoot connectivity issues with native ActiveSync
- Troubleshoot Exchange Online configuration issues (15–20%)
- Troubleshoot provisioning issues
- Troubleshoot recipient issues
- Troubleshoot org-wide settings
- Troubleshoot public folder Issues
- Troubleshoot hybrid and migration issues (10–15%)
- Troubleshoot hybrid configuration issues
- Troubleshoot migration issues
Conclusion
MS-220 is not a beginners exam, you need to have a lot of experience in Exchange Hybrid, On-Premises and Online and in all areas covered in the Skills Measured.
Hope you enjoyed this post and found it useful, until next time!
Michael Durkan 