Grow your skills and build collaborative solutions: Exam MS-600 Building Applications and Solutions with Microsoft 365 Core Services

In this new era of hybrid work, organizations are increasingly investing in collaborative apps and solutions that connect their employees across locations and time zones, help streamline work, and improve productivity. With more than 250 million monthly active users, Microsoft Teams will be the single, organizing layer for business processes. As a developer, you are uniquely positioned to influence and shape this future of hybrid work. The right skillset, knowledge of Teams platform, and Microsoft 365 services will be crucial as you embark on this journey.

I recently got certified as a Microsoft 365 Developer associate after passing the MS-600: Building Applications and Solutions with Microsoft 365 Core Services exam. The concepts covered, practice exercises and overall learning from the preparation helped me in gaining the much needed technical know-how to enable collaborative workplace scenarios. In this blog, let’s look at some of the key learning areas I received from the certification exam through the lens of real-world scenarios.

Imagine if…

… driving virtual, informed patient care is seamless

It’s a typical Monday morning as Sandra grabs her coffee while catching up on unread Microsoft Teams messages. She receives a meeting notification from one of her patients for a virtual physician-patient consult. During the consult, at the request of the patient, Sandra uses her Teams app to invite a sign language interpreter without interrupting the meeting flow. As the consult nears its end, Sandra takes notes, schedules follow up meeting with patient, automating much of the paperwork and workflows involved. With the help of meeting extensibility, Sandra delivers a great patient experience while saving time and effort for hospital staff.

Refers to Avanade Virtual Patient Visit solution in our Build session (6:11)

… enterprise incident management is effortless

Daniela receives an escalation email on an outage incident with the details shown as a card on her Outlook email. She sees that her team has already started to work on mitigation. A few hours later, she opens the mail to request an update on the latest status and ETA. The card automatically refreshes to show mitigated status and the fix. Daniela changes her ‘Request for update’ email to ‘Kudos’, congratulating her team on a quick resolution.

… employee connections are made stronger, even in hybrid work

Allan is a software engineer, football enthusiast, and a sci-fi fan. Ever since remote work started, he felt disconnected from his colleagues and office clubs. That is until Friday when he was introduced to a virtual hallway experience app by a fellow colleague who started a “room” to talk about all things football. Two months later, Allan is a proud owner of an active football community on Microsoft Teams who meet up every other Friday for watch parties.

Refers to Comcast ‘bump’ solution presented in our Build session (16:06)

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If you are a developer excited about enabling scenarios like these and empowering employees, check out MS-600: Building Applications and Solutions with Microsoft 365 Core Services. This certification exam will be a great next step towards building these solutions, growing your skills and advancing your career.

Learning paths and skills covered

The certification exam covers the information included in the following learning paths and skills:

Develop apps for Microsoft Teams – Walks through Microsoft Teams platform capabilities, with samples to build bots, tabs, task modules, messaging extensions, and connectors. The app building learning from this learning path will guide you to build an app similar to the one that helped Sandra deliver excellent patient care.
Extend Microsoft 365 – Fundamental – Introduces you to the options available for extending Office applications, including Office Add-ins, the SharePoint Framework, and actionable messages that extend email in Outlook. Daniela’s outage incident was sent and tracked as an actionable card message on Outlook.
Build Apps with Microsoft Graph – Shows you how to harness the power of rich, people-centric data and insights in Microsoft cloud using Microsoft Graph APIs. The modules cover user data, file APIs, query parameters, and ways to efficiently retrieve and use this data by handling traffic and throttling. Graph APIs were extensively used to power the rooms and the groups in Virtual hallway experience solution.
Implement Microsoft Identity – Walks through how to build a secure solution with access to applications internal and external to the Microsoft 365 suite. Modules cover building a single sign-on, authorizing permissions, and accessing custom APIs securely. In all the scenarios we saw, Identity plays a key role in the background to ensure privacy and security.

Benefits of Certification

A globally recognized Microsoft Certification validates your skills and abilities.

If you are a developer building solutions for your organization or for your customer, the certification on your resume can distinguish you from your colleagues and can help in your career development.
If you are a Microsoft Partner organization looking to make a mark, Microsoft 365 Certified: Developer Associate certification for at least four individuals in your organization brings you one step closer to earning an advanced specialization in Custom solutions for Microsoft Teams. This provides a means for your organization to showcase validated capability to develop and deploy custom apps and solutions with Microsoft Teams

How do I get started?

To get your certification, start with the recommended learning paths associated with the exam to start building your skills. Don’t miss out on getting your hands dirty on the practice exercises that are included with the learning modules.

You can take practice tests before taking the exam to test yourself and get familiar with the structure of the exam.