Microsoft

Microsoft AI-102 retired on June 30, 2026. New candidates should not prepare for it as an active exam. Microsoft has moved the Azure AI engineer path toward Microsoft AI-103, Developing AI Apps and Agents on Azure. The productive transition is to keep the Azure AI skills that still matter while updating your preparation for agentic applications, retrieval, generative AI, orchestration, safety, and modern operational practices. What transfers from AI-102 AI-102 built valuable foundations in Azure AI services, language, vision, search, document processing, conversational solutions, security, monitoring, and responsible AI. Those…

A Microsoft security operations analyst is responsible for turning security telemetry into decisions. The work begins with signals from identities, endpoints, applications, cloud resources, email, and other systems, but the analyst’s value comes from deciding what those signals mean, which events belong together, what should be investigated next, and when to contain, escalate, or tune a control. Microsoft SC-200 maps closely to that operating model. SC-200 remains active, and Microsoft’s English skills outline effective October 21, 2026 is now the current exam blueprint. The responsibilities below focus on durable SOC…

Microsoft SC-300 remains the exam for the Microsoft Certified: Identity and Access Administrator Associate credential. As of the April 27, 2026 skills update, the role centers on designing, implementing, and operating identity and access management with Microsoft Entra. That includes user and workload identities, authentication, authorization, risk, Global Secure Access, application access, identity governance, privileged access, and monitoring. That scope explains why SC-300 is more than an “identity product” exam. Modern digital trust depends on deciding who or what is requesting access, how strongly that identity has been verified, what…

DP-600 remains the active Microsoft Fabric Analytics Engineer exam in 2026. The current role is not “Power BI with a few Fabric features added.” Microsoft expects candidates to design, create, secure, maintain, and optimize analytical assets such as lakehouses, warehouses, and semantic models, while working with stakeholders and with architects, analysts, engineers, and administrators. The July 21, 2026 blueprint gives the largest share of the exam to preparing data, with the remaining weight split between maintaining analytics solutions and implementing semantic models. Candidates working toward the Fabric Analytics Engineer Associate…

DP-700 is easiest to prepare for when you stop treating Microsoft Fabric as a list of products and start treating it as one operating data system. The exam expects candidates to understand how data enters Fabric, how it is transformed, how state is managed, how access is controlled, how failures are detected, and how the resulting analytics solution is optimized over time. The current DP-700 path toward Fabric Data Engineer Associate remains active in 2026, with an English-language blueprint update scheduled for October 19. Candidates preparing now should use the…

Microsoft MD-102 reflects endpoint administration as an ongoing cloud-managed service, not a one-time desktop build exercise. The current role spans device preparation and enrollment, policy, applications, security, updates, automation, monitoring, reporting, and collaboration with identity and security teams. MD-102 is current on October 6, 2026; Microsoft has published an English skills update effective October 27, 2026. The point here is not to claim a dramatic historical break at a single date, but to explain the operational model candidates must use now. Endpoint administration is now a lifecycle A device moves…

PL-300 remains Microsoft’s core certification exam for Power BI data analysts, but the exam continues to evolve with the platform. The current skills measured, effective April 20, 2026, organize the role into four areas: preparing the data; modeling the data; visualizing and analyzing the data; and managing and securing Power BI. The first three each account for 25–30% of the exam, while management and security account for 15–20%. That weighting makes one thing clear: PL-300 is not mainly a visualization exam. A candidate who can build attractive charts but struggles…

Microsoft AZ-900 is a fundamentals exam, but its breadth makes random memorization inefficient. A better preparation plan follows the structure of the current exam: begin with cloud concepts, connect those concepts to Azure architecture and service families, and finish by learning how Azure environments are managed, monitored, costed, and governed. Microsoft’s current English AZ-900 blueprint is measured from July 20, 2026. Cloud concepts account for 25–30%, Azure architecture and services for 35–40%, and Azure management and governance for 30–35%. That balance makes the Microsoft AZ-900 exam a test of connected…

The AZ-305 exam remains active in 2026 and Microsoft refreshed its English skill outline on April 17. The exam measures design rather than administration: identity/governance/monitoring, data storage, business continuity, and infrastructure. Infrastructure carries the largest weighting, but the categories work together in every credible Azure design. Calling AZ-305 ‘strategic’ is only useful if strategy is tied to actual architecture responsibility. The exam does not turn a candidate into a visionary through terminology. It rewards people who can translate business and technical requirements into Azure designs that can be secured, operated,…

DP-100, Designing and Implementing a Data Science Solution on Azure, retired on June 1, 2026 together with the Azure Data Scientist Associate certification. Microsoft replaced that certification direction with AI-300 and the Machine Learning Operations Engineer Associate role, which expands the focus from building machine-learning models toward operating both traditional ML and generative-AI systems. The retired DP-100 exam still contains durable data-science lessons: experimentation, Azure Machine Learning workspaces, compute, data assets, training, evaluation, deployment, monitoring, responsible AI, and model lifecycle. Those skills are not obsolete; they now sit inside a…

Microsoft MB-800 is the exam for the Dynamics 365 Business Central Functional Consultant Associate role. In 2026 the role is broader than learning navigation through an ERP. Candidates need to configure the company, financial processes, sales, purchasing, inventory, security, and core application behavior while understanding where Business Central fits into a larger Microsoft business-app environment. Begin with company setup and operating foundations Practice creating a company configuration that could actually be used. Review number series, posting setup, dimensions, currencies, payment terms, locations, users, permissions, and the master data that later…

Microsoft DP-900 is the current Azure Data Fundamentals exam for people beginning to work with data in the cloud. It tests the ability to recognize workloads and choose suitable Azure data services, not expert-level SQL tuning, data engineering automation or production database administration. Microsoft’s English study guide lists skills effective July 21, 2026. Four domains are assessed: core data concepts (25–30%), relational data on Azure (20–25%), non-relational data on Azure (15–20%), and analytics workloads on Azure (25–30%). Using those categories to organize practice is more reliable than following an older…

DP-300 remains Microsoft’s active exam for Azure SQL administration in 2026. The current blueprint is focused on the operational work of administering relational database solutions built with Azure SQL services and SQL Server, including cloud-native, on-premises, and hybrid environments. That is narrower and more practical than a generic “Azure data” exam: candidates are expected to manage availability, security, performance, automation, migration, and day-to-day database operations. The strongest way to prepare for DP-300 is to think like an operator. A database can be deployed correctly and still fail the business if…

PL-900 remains Microsoft’s active Power Platform Fundamentals exam in 2026. The current blueprint, updated in July 2026, is much more useful when treated as a business-solutions exam than as a product-definition quiz. Candidates need to understand how Power Apps, Dataverse, Power Automate, environments, governance, and Copilot Studio fit together around real business processes. The Microsoft PL-900 exam is designed for beginners, but “fundamentals” does not mean trivial. The challenge is usually breadth: you need to recognize which capability solves which problem, understand where the data lives, and know why governance…

AZ-801 is now a retired Microsoft exam. Microsoft retired both AZ-800 and AZ-801 on September 30, 2026, closing the two-exam route that had been used for the Windows Server Hybrid Administrator Associate certification. The change is especially important for older preparation content because an article can still describe valuable Windows Server skills while being wrong about the exam a candidate can schedule today. The current path is AZ-802, Administering Windows Server. Microsoft’s current Windows Server Administrator Associate route consolidates administration across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments into a single exam…