Revision Guide for MB-200: Microsoft Power Platform + Dynamics 365 Core

Photo Credit: @nickmorrison

You’re taking the Microsoft MB-200 Exam and looking for material to help you study? Great, you’re in the right place — this revision guide has the tools and tips to steer you in the right direction, and get you on the road to passing.

I recently passed MB-200 by following the steps below, and ensuring 1–2 hours revision per night, starting around 2 weeks prior to the exam.

Everyone’s experience level is different, and therefore you may feel more comfortable starting revision sooner, or later, however it’s important to leave enough time to be able to cover all of the material below and follow the labs.

Open edX

Microsoft’s course offerings provided through Open edX, were, the most engaging and helpful part of my revision. Not least because you get 4 shiny certificates (see image below) if you pass all of the modules — giving you that winning feeling before your exam has even started!

To enroll, follow the links below (individually), and click the ‘Enroll Now’ button, found at the top of the screen in a yellow bar, when prompted.

1. Power Platform Applications
2. Power Platform Automation
3. Power Platform Integrations
4. Power Platform Test and Deploy

Once you’re enrolled in each of the courses, begin working through them, starting with Power Platform Applications (1), and finishing with Power Platform Test and Deploy (4).

Each course consists of a combination of documentation, video and lab exercises, for you to complete, before moving onto the next topic. At the end of each topic, ‘Security’ for example, you will have a lab, where you can either use your own Dynamics 365 (CE) Trial Environment, or, opt to use the built in Virtual Machine which Microsoft provides as part of the course. I would recommend using your own trial, as you can come back to this later and review what exactly you implemented, as well as build up a solution throughout the duration of all the modules/courses.

After the lab, you will have a topic assessment, which will mark you on your knowledge of the topic you have just covered.

Beware: Although you have two chances to submit your answer to each question, after that, your answer is final, and will contribute to your final course score. Un-Enrolling and Re-Enrolling from the course will not erase this, so make sure you’re happy with your answer before you submit.

The official course syllabus suggests spending 2–4 hours per week, per course, however as I highlight above, feel free to move at your own pace, providing you firstly review the entire course briefly, to understand the effort involved, and how much time you personally will need to comfortably go over each module in full.

1 of 4 Available Certificates for Passing The MB-200 Series Open edX Courses

Microsoft Learning

Logging in using your Microsoft account, preferably the one you will be using to book/take your exam, navigate to the link below:

Browse all - Learn

This link is filtered on ‘Product > Dynamics 365’, naturally, however, there are further filters you can select on the left-hand side-bar, to drill down on specific modules you may want to cover. I’ve left this as broad as possible for now, as this exam is ‘Core’, and not focused on one specific module, such as other exams in the certification path, such as MB-210 or MB-230.

Trial Environment

The Best Way of Learning About Anything, is by Doing — Richard Branson.

I don’t believe Richard Branson covers Dynamics 365, or MB-200 for that matter, but if he did, chances are he would say: Setup a trial environment and start doing.

The best way to learn about something, is by trying it for yourself, and seeing what the outcome is. I know for a fact that having Dynamics 365 as my day job has massively helped me during both this exam and past, as your own experiences are the things you’ll remember most when reading questions.

How to Split Your Time

Fortunately, Microsoft offers an overview, publicly available to all exam takers before they embark upon booking their exam. This overview breaks down the skills measured during the exam, and gives you a better idea of both what to expect, and what exactly Microsoft are looking for you to demonstrate proficiency of, in order to pass the exam.

The skills measured during MB-200, are as follow:

Perform discovery, planning, and analysis (5–10%)

Create and validate documentation

• create high-level entity relationship diagram
• create and document mock-ups
• identify document data for migration and integration
• determine out of the box (OOB) functionality
• validate functional requirements
• select artifacts necessary for a proof of concept (POC) of functional solution designs

Perform continuous collaboration with customer

• identify collaboration tools
• perform an audit
• identify artifacts to be recorded in change logs
• select between managed and unmanaged solutions
• identify components for entities

Manage user experience design (20–25%)

Create and configure apps

• configure settings to meet minimal capabilities
• configure out of the box and custom items to meet minimal capabilities specified
• create and configure dashboards
• create and configure forms
• create and configure charts
• create and manage reports
• create and configure views
• design site map
• export or import field translation
• configure mobile settings

Create and configure templates

• identify available templates in Dynamics 365
• create email templates
• create Excel templates
• create Word templates

Create and manage processes

• configure a business rule
• configure a business process flow
• configure a workflow

Manage entities and data (15–20%)

Modify an existing data model

• create new or an modify existing entity
• create new or modify existing relationships
• create new or modify existing fields
• manage accounts and contacts

Import and export data

• import data by using the import data wizard
• export data from Dynamics 365
• create data templates
• choose file types to upload into system
• identify source fields to Dynamics 365 Fields mapping
• save mappings to template

Manage data

• perform data cleanup
• mitigate data loading risks
• mitigate excessive database growth
• configure bulk record deletion
• configure duplicate detection setting

Implement security (5–10%)

Configure security in Office 365

• identify Dynamics 365 security role assignments
• add users to security group administration

Configure security settings

• manage security roles
• manage users
• manage teams
• create and manage field security profiles
• configure hierarchy security

Implement integration (15–20%)

Configure Outlook add-in

• identify required client software requirements
• identify required server software requirements
• configure server-side sync
• develop a plan to deploy Outlook App to users
• perform unit testing
• identify minimum application and operation system environments

Configure email integration

• configure email mailboxes
• configure email protocols
• configure email settings
• enable server-side synchronization
• enable Dynamics 365 App for Outlook

Integrate with Office 365

• determine enabled Office 365 capabilities
• design SharePoint online folder configuration architecture
• create SharePoint sites and document locations
• integrate OneNote, integrate OneDrive for Business
• configure integration with the Office 365 toolset
• validate integrity of data in SharePoint
• integrate data by using Excel data online

Create, configure, and maintain Microsoft Flows

• create service connections
• configure source and target fields
• create, validate, and execute Microsoft Flow logic
• share flows with other users

Perform solutions deployment and testing (25–30%)

Manage environments

• determine whether to use managed or unmanaged solution
• determine subcomponents to include in solution
• create or use a custom publisher
• migrate from sandbox environments
• administer environments
• configure environments

Manage applications

• manage applications using the Dynamics 365 Administration Center
• manage Dynamics 365 applications using solutions

Perform system administration

• configure connection roles
• configure language and locales
• configure currencies
• configure subjects
• configure custom help
• configure session and inactivity timeouts
• manage global audit settings
• configure audit user access
• manage audit logs
• manage entity and field auditing
• configure relevant search
• configure QuickFind settings
• configure categorized search

Perform quality assurance

• create system, performance, unit, and regression testing scripts
• perform performance tuning
• perform optimization testing
• verify network capacity and throughput by using the Dynamics 365 Diagnostics Tool
• perform data query performance

Manage solutions

• create solutions
• export solutions
• import solutions
• distribute solutions and patches

Thanks for reading, and Best of Luck! If you’d like to learn more around other Microsoft Exams, then stay tuned and feel free to have a read of other revision guides after this one, such as our MB-210 Revision Guide.

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Credits: The section of this post titled ‘How to Split Your Time’ contains extracts from the following Microsoft Web Page. This information was accurate as of August 27th 2019.

Exam MB-200: Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement Core