Power Platform Functional Consultant Associate: Moving from MB-200 to PL-200 (incl. free mapping)
At Inspire 2020 Microsoft announced two new Power Platform exams: PL-200 for functional consultants and PL-400 for developers, thereby replacing the not-that-old-anyway MB-200 and MB-400 exams. Also, each individual exam now leads to its corresponding certification. The expert-level / architect exam MB-600 and certification continue to exist.
Whereas the changes to the developer exam are more subtle, more fundamental things had to happen to the MB-200 exam outline. Interesting as it was, with all its legacy Dynamics365 features and platform maintenance elements it proved to be a steep learning curve for those without a Dynamics365 background.
One can hardly blame Microsoft for trying to incorporate Power Automate, Power BI and Power Virtual Agents into the related certification. Microsoft Learn and the skills outline were not in sync anyway. But what about the elements that have now been left out? How has the outline evolved exactly? Let’s try to figure it out.
The good
Aligning with the product portfolio
- The exam now covers canvas apps as well as portal apps. Canvas apps learning items include some of the newer features, such as offline capabilities, component libraries and app checker.
- Power Automate learning items have been reworded and UI flows, flow checker and analytics have been added. Business process flows only had one learning item in MB-200, but now have multiple, including an item on how you can then work with the CDS entity of the business process flow itself.
- Power Virtual Agents is completely new and now has a full chapter to cover bots, topics and (PVA) entities.
- Power BI has also been included, albeit in the context of integrating Power Apps with other platforms. This makes sense as Power BI is a topic in itself and leading into the data analyst space. Those interested should also consider the DA-100 exam.
- AI builder basics and integration with Power Apps and Power Automate have been included as well.
- Teams integration had already been added during the latest update of MB-200, but as a lot of progress is being made on integrating pretty much anything into Teams, more scope items made sense. Interestingly, there is also an item on provisioning a Teams channel using Power Automate.
Also part of this new Teams integration scope is a scope item named “configure app policies”. I would love for someone to clarify what that relates to though. It could refer to how different sets of Teams apps are presented to different user groups (manage app setup policies), but that is already pretty in-depth for the purpose of a non-Teams exam. Maybe it refers to something else?
Out with the one-offs
The chapter on implementing integration, which covered the App for Outlook, server-side email integration and SharePoint has been removed completely (apart from the Power Automate items obviously). The main issue learners had with these items is that they often required the global admin role, which meant as much as having to set up a complete trial tenant to be able to even test this.
Some of the system administration items were also a bit technical or one-off, such as the session and inactivity time-outs, configuring Microsoft Social Engagement or interpreting the Dynamics 365 diagnostics tool.
The initial set-up of admin roles and license assignments for which you needed access to the Microsoft 365 Admin Center has also been descoped, probably as it belongs more to the M365 certification area anyway.
Moving things to the most appropriate exam
Some scope items belong “more” to the developer, architect or SME exams MB-400/PL-400, MB-600, MB-2XX and albeit true that a functional consultant has to be aware of these things, they were a bit difficult to study.
- Most items of Chapter 1. Perform discovery, planning, and analysis (5–10%) (although removing the chapter completely in PL-200 also raises some questions)
- 2.1.1 configure settings to meet minimal capabilities
- 2.1.2 configure out of the box and custom items to meet minimal capabilities specified
- 3.1.5 manage accounts and contacts
- 5.1.5 identify minimum application and operation system environments (App for Outlook)
- 6.4.1 create system, performance, unit, and regression testing scripts
- 6.4.5 perform data query performance
The bad and the ugly
What about data management
Apart from a specific item on duplicate detection, PL-200 has only one exam item on data management: 1.3.3 perform data management tasks. This could mean any of the following MB-200 items:
- 3.2.1 import data by using the import data wizard
- 3.2.2 export data from Dynamics 365
- 3.2.3 create data templates
- 3.2.4 choose file types to upload into system
- 3.2.5 identify source fields to Dynamics 365 Fields mapping
- 3.2.6 save mappings to template
- 3.2.7 import field translations
- 3.3.1 perform data cleanup
- 3.3.2 mitigate data loading risks
- 3.3.3 mitigate excessive database growth
- 3.3.4 configure bulk record deletion
This seems very strange to me, also given the particular attention data import received on the MB-200 exam. Learners might recall that the MB-200 exam questions often went into great detail about these areas. Questions such as “put the fields in the exact order as they appear on the screens” were no exception.
From my day to day experience I can tell vouch for the fact that data management and data cleaning is a functional consultant concern and not the smallest one either, as often they are uniquely placed to make sense of the data and describe the technical interventions required.
“Solutions, solutions, solutions!” (Steve Ballmer, 2020)
Where PL-100 is for citizen developers, PL-200 is for people who create apps as part of their profession. One of the key steps towards Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) is understanding solutions. But as PL-200 assumes that the candidate will be working with solution architects, a quality assurance team and a DevOps team, any ALM concern has been descoped, including solutions.
For me, thinking in solutions is what sets PL-200 apart from PL-100. Once you know about solutions, you’ll find it cringeworthy if anything dares to create an entity or app outside the controlled environment a solution provide. So PL-200 people, please research solutions!
Bye chapter 1
As mentioned before, MB-200’s first chapter on envisioning the solution and establishing a high-level functional design was a bit hard to study, but it was also one of the key elements to having an intentional approach to app development, this “PL-100 to PL-200” mindshift.
As an alternative, consider the Power Apps Guidance Documentation. It contains these kind of project and design considerations, and recently Microsoft added a section on common app development patterns. It is not only the task of the solution architect (MB-600), but also of the functional consultant to know about this.
Quid Power Platform Administrator scope
PL-200 will replace MB-200 completely, which means it is also the core exam for all Dynamics365 associate certifications. At the same time, many scope items related to Dynamics instance / Power Platform environment administration, configuration and quality assurance were removed (most of which have been mentioned already). So two things come to mind:
- What about these generic Dynamics365 settings? Will they move to MB-2XX exams?
- Are we to expect a Power Platform Admin exam at some point, or might this scope be taken up by Microsoft 365 certifications?
Excel mapping download
I have mapped MB-200 to PL-200 and the other way around. For those interested, you can find the Excel here. Please note that this mapping is a personal initiative and is not an official document.
I hope you found this article useful! Let me know your thoughts.
