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The announcement of the new Azure exams at Inspire 2018 signalled the beginning of a complete overhaul of the Microsoft exam and certification structure. We have entered a world of role-based certs as opposed to product based certs – and the ones we worked so hard to get, such as Office 365, will be retired soon. Of course, there is still a little time left if you want to get these for posterity.

Moving to a role-based certification system – similar to Amazon – makes complete sense from the perspective of having qualifications reflective of the job you actually do as opposed to a set of knowledge on a particular product you may never actually use. Yet, with so many new exams and certs being released in such a short space of time, there are as many who don’t know where to start as there are those who are engaged…

Teams is my favourite application within Office 365. Like the IT Pros in our panel today, it is a subject I’m very passionate about. As a hub for team collaboration it integrates people, content and tools to make the Team more engaged and effective. It has been a runaway success. Since it’s introduction it has been the fastest growing app in Microsoft history. Back at Ignite 2018 we saw the numbers – 329,000 organisations using it (over 400,000 at the time of writing), 87 Fortune 500 companies and 54 companies with more than 10,000 active users (Microsoft, 2018). Yet it is also a young application and as such it is still evolving rapidly. Whilst positioned as an Inner Loop collaboration app, by introducing features such as the 5000 user limit or (soon to be) Private Channels, we ask – is it evolving into something different from it’s original design and…