70-331 Certification Study guide

by albandrod, posted in SharePoint 2013

For those people who are thinking in obtaining 70-331 SharePoint Certification, this post is for them. I will post a serie of links related with information about the certification. So, good luck:

When I do Microsoft Certification exams I like to do everything I can – read the books, read the articles, practice exams, online prep exams… anything at all that can help! But 70-331 is still pretty new, and while there seems to be plenty of sites out there trying to sell their information, I wanted a set of reliable sources that match the content of the exam. Hence this post.

The exam itself has 70 questions with a total score of 1,000 possible. The pass mark is 700. The format of the exam is:

  1. 30 general SharePoint 2013 questions comprising multiple choice, single choice, and do-things-in-the-right-order question types
  2. 5 case studies with varying numbers and types of questions i.e. 8, 10, 12, etc.

There is a focus on SharePoint Online and Office 365 integration with on-premise SharePoint farms, particularly in the case studies, so it is worth focusing some attention in this area (which I quickly found out I was woefully underprepared for :/). There is more information for Hybrid environments on TechNet under Hybrid for SharePoint Server 2013, and I would strongly advise understanding all the content available on this subject. See the Case Studies section in part 2 of this post for more information.

Articles are sourced from TechNet and Microsoft blogs, with some additional content added where I felt it helped with my study.

1. Design a SharePoint Topology (20-25%)

2. Plan Security (20-25%)

3. Install and Configure SharePoint Farms (20-25%)

3.1  Plan installation

3.2  Plan and configure farm-wide settings

3.3  Create and configure enterprise search

3.4  Create and configure a Managed Metadata Service (MMS) application

3.5  Create and configure a User Profile Service (UPA) application

4. Create and Configure Web Applications and Site Collections (15-20%)

4.1  Provision and configure web applications

4.2  Create and maintain site collections

4.3  Manage site and site collection security

4.4  Manage search

4.5  Manage taxonomy

5.Maintain a Core SharePoint Environment (15-20%)

5.1  Monitor a SharePoint environment

5.2  Tune and optimize a SharePoint environment

5.3  Troubleshoot a SharePoint environment

Other Ressources

General Study

SharePoint 2013 training for IT pros

The 70-331 Microsoft information page has the “Skills Being Measured” section, which has a list of the exam topics being covered. I will be working my way through the sections of the skills list and collecting links to relevant references that provide information on the topic. Hoping this is useful to other people too! These articles were gleaned from Bing using the search terms: “site:technet.microsoft.com -site:social.technet.microsoft.com sharepoint 2013 [keywords]”, replacing [keywords] with the content I was looking for. This searches only TechNet, ignores social.technet, includes sharepoint 2013, plus my keywords.

Advertisement

2 thoughts on “70-331 Certification Study guide”

  1. A very good post. I passed this exam in December 2014 and I found PowerShell knowledge was very important as there were enough questions on the test for you to fail if you do not understand how cmdlets work.

    I would also recommend building a lab to test all of the service applications, learn their dependencies and for every task in SharePoint you want to administer study which cmdlet will do the same task in PowerShell!

    Like

    Reply

    1. You’re right Lee, I founded a lot of PowerShell questions and a lot of questions related with hybrid platforms. It’s very important to have clear how to sync users with the O365 tenant and the options to install the AADSync, DirSync, FIM, etc…
      Also I found very important to know differrnces between metadata and managed navigation, pinned terms, etc.

      Like

      Reply

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s