AB-650 · CHEAT SHEET

Microsoft 365 Certified: Microsoft 365 and AI Services Administrator Associate

Key concepts grouped by official exam weight.

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1. Configure and manage Microsoft 365 tenants and workloads

20–25%

Configure and manage a Microsoft 365 tenant

The organization theme controls the logo, colors, and text shown in the top navigation bar of Microsoft 365, and it's configured under Org settings > Organization profile > Custom themes; only global administrators can change it. A tenant supports up to five themes (one default plus four group themes, which can only be linked to Microsoft 365 groups). Sign-in page branding (illustration, banner logo) is configured separately, through Microsoft Entra ID.
Adding, modifying, or removing a custom domain in Microsoft 365 requires the Domain Name Administrator role. If the registrar supports Domain Connect, ownership and DNS records are confirmed automatically; otherwise ownership is verified manually with a TXT record, an MX record, or a text file on the website. The fallback onmicrosoft.com domain is created automatically, a tenant is limited to five in total, and once created they can't be deleted.
Within Org settings, the Security & privacy tab holds the password expiration policy (passwords never expire by default; the User administrator role is required), and the Organization profile tab holds release preferences, where you choose standard release or targeted release for the whole organization or for selected users, which requires the Global administrator role. Changing the default operating system for Cloud PCs, on the Services tab, only affects Cloud PCs created after the change.
Group-based licensing lets you assign licenses to security groups, mail-enabled groups, or Microsoft 365 groups from Billing > Licenses, and requires at least the Groups Administrator, License Administrator, or User Administrator role; it doesn't support nested groups, and the Errors & issues tab shows assignment failures. Pay-as-you-go billing connects an Azure subscription to a billing policy with an optional budget, but reaching 100% of the budget doesn't stop the service — only disconnecting the payment method does.
Administrators monitor AI service licenses across portals: the Microsoft 365 admin center shows Copilot reports via the AI Administrator role, Power Platform manages Copilot Studio capacity per environment, and Purview audits Copilot activity. Agent 365 is licensed per user, and its agent registry limits governance actions to the AI Administrator or Global Administrator roles.

Manage Microsoft 365 workloads

A shared mailbox lets several people read and send mail from a common address without an account for each of them. Access is granted with three delegate permissions: Full Access to open and manage the contents, Send As so the message appears to come from the mailbox, and Send on Behalf, which shows who sent it. If a delegate holds the last two, Exchange Online uses Send As.
Whoever creates a team in Microsoft Teams becomes its owner. Owners can delete the team, add members to a private team and promote or demote other users; members cannot. Standard channels are open to the whole team, private channels limit membership to part of it, and shared channels let you bring in people or other teams without adding them to the team.
Copilot availability in meetings is set in the meeting policies of the Teams admin center, next to recording and transcription, and also with Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy. The administrator decides whether Copilot requires a saved transcript or whether the organizer can choose. When the organizer turns Copilot off for a meeting, recording and transcription are turned off with it.
A SharePoint administrator creates team sites, connected to a Microsoft 365 group, or communication sites. In the former, permissions are managed through the group's owners and members; in the latter, through the SharePoint owners, members and visitors groups. External sharing must first be allowed at the organization level before it can be turned on for a specific site.
Restricted Content Discovery hides a SharePoint site's content from Copilot and from organization-wide search without changing its permissions. Restricted Access Control, by contrast, limits who can enter the site to a defined group. The data access governance reports in SharePoint Advanced Management help locate sites at risk of oversharing before Copilot is rolled out more widely.

2. Govern and secure Microsoft 365 tenants and workloads

40–45%

Manage identities in Microsoft Entra

In Microsoft Entra ID, creating a user requires at least the User Administrator role, and inviting an external guest requires the Guest Inviter role. Creating the account sets its user principal name, initial password, and whether sign-in is enabled. When deleted, the account stays suspended for 30 days before permanent deletion, and during that window it can be restored along with its licenses.
Microsoft Entra's external collaboration settings control who can invite guest users, their directory access, and which domains are allowed or blocked. By default anyone can invite guests, who get limited directory access, and the Guest Inviter role lets an organization delegate that task without a broader admin role. If it conflicts with cross-tenant access settings, the more restrictive option applies.
Microsoft 365 offers several group types: Microsoft 365 Groups support mail and dynamic membership; security groups grant resource access and can contain users or devices; distribution groups and mail-enabled security groups send mail but don't support dynamic membership. A group's type can't be changed after creation, and the Groups Administrator role is required to create, edit, delete, and restore groups.
Microsoft 365 offers roles with different scopes, such as Password Administrator for limited tasks versus Global Administrator, with almost unlimited access. Privileged Identity Management turns role assignments into eligible assignments that require activation, with possible approval and multifactor authentication, and only a Privileged Role Administrator or Global Administrator can manage them for other administrators.
Administrative units in Microsoft Entra ID group users, groups, or devices so an administrator's role can be scoped to just part of the organization instead of the whole tenant. A Privileged Role Administrator creates them, and can make a restricted management administrative unit, which protects sensitive objects even from Global Administrators who lack a role assigned at that scope.

Implement and manage authentication and access in Microsoft Entra

The Authentication methods policy in Microsoft Entra ID is the recommended way to manage how users sign in and perform multifactor authentication, replacing the legacy MFA and password reset policies. An Authentication Policy Administrator edits it from Entra ID > Authentication methods, enabling each method for the whole tenant or for specific groups.
Microsoft Entra Password Protection blocks weak passwords by normalizing them and checking them against a global banned password list (automatic and not configurable) and a custom list of up to 1,000 organization-specific terms, managed by an Authentication Policy Administrator. The same protection can extend to on-premises Active Directory via a proxy and a domain controller agent, starting in Audit mode.
Self-service password reset (SSPR) lets users reset or unlock their own account without IT help. Configuring it requires at least the Authentication Policy Administrator role, and Microsoft recommends requiring one more method for registration than for reset. With Password Writeback, the new password is also written to on-premises Active Directory, and administrator accounts follow their own two-gate policy, which prohibits security questions.
Administrators investigate sign-in failures under Entra ID > Monitoring & health > Sign-in logs, filtering by user, application, or failure status; the Reports Reader role is enough to view them. Each failed entry includes a failure reason and additional details that usually point to the cause and the fix, plus an error code that can be looked up in the error code lookup tool.
Conditional Access enforces if-then policies based on signals such as user, location, device, application, and risk, and is applied after first-factor authentication. Microsoft Entra ID Protection detects and helps remediate identity risk, with distinct roles (Security Reader, Operator, and Administrator) granting different access to reports, risk handling, or policy configuration.

Secure Microsoft 365 workloads

Alert policies in the Microsoft Defender portal generate alerts when malicious or suspicious activity affects an entity, such as email, a user, or a mailbox; default policies watch for things like assigning admin privileges in Exchange Online or phishing campaigns. Microsoft recommends managing alerts from the Incidents queue, where they're correlated with other related alerts and with automated investigation and response (AIR) findings.
In Defender for Office 365, mail is protected with anti-malware, anti-spam, anti-phishing, Safe Links, and Safe Attachments policies, managed under Threat policies. Standard and Strict apply Microsoft's recommended settings and always take precedence over custom policies regardless of priority; Built-in protection gives baseline Safe Links and Safe Attachments to anyone not covered elsewhere.
Threat Explorer (Plan 2) and Real-time detections (Plan 1) let teams hunt for already-delivered malicious mail using properties such as Delivery action and Directionality, then remediate it by moving or deleting it (soft delete, hard delete); approving those actions needs the Search and Purge role. AIR, with Plan 2, starts automated investigations from alerts such as user submissions and queues actions for SecOps to approve.
Attack simulation training lets admins launch phishing simulations using techniques such as Credential Harvest, Malware Attachment, OAuth Consent Grant, or Drive-by URL, choosing target users, payload, notifications, and training. Training campaigns assign training modules without a prior simulation. Managing it requires Attack Simulation Administrator (full control) or Attack Payload Author (payloads only).

Protect data in Microsoft 365 by using Microsoft Purview

Microsoft Purview DLP identifies, monitors, and protects sensitive information across Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams chat and channel messages, endpoint devices, and, in preview, Microsoft 365 Copilot. Each location supports different conditions and actions: SharePoint and OneDrive can block external access, while Devices can audit or restrict copying to USB drives. Policies are created and published from the Microsoft Purview portal.
Microsoft Purview sensitivity labels classify and protect content through encryption, content marking (headers, footers, watermarks), and container protection for sites and Teams. They're published to users and groups through label policies, which can set a default label, require justification for downgrading, and enforce mandatory labeling. An item can only have one label at a time, and its position in the label list determines which is more restrictive.
Retention policies apply the same settings to all content in a location, such as a site or mailbox, while retention labels allow item-level exceptions and support extra capabilities like event-based retention, marking content as a record, or disposition review. When multiple settings apply, retention always wins over deletion and the longest period prevails. Teams and Viva Engage only support retention policies, not retention labels.
A DLP alert moves through six stages: trigger, notify, triage, investigate, remediate, and tune. Alerts are primarily investigated in the Microsoft Defender portal, which groups them into incidents and retains them for six months, or in the Purview DLP alerts dashboard, which only retains them for 30 days. Accessing the dashboard requires the Manage alerts and DLP Compliance Management roles (or its read-only version), and viewing matched sensitive content also requires the Data classification content viewer role.
Microsoft Purview Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) for AI provides a central place to monitor usage of Copilot, agents, and other generative AI apps. It includes ready-to-use one-click policies, data risk assessments that detect oversharing, with an automatic weekly assessment for the top 100 SharePoint sites, and an Activity explorer showing prompts, responses, and detected sensitive information types. It requires Compliance Administrator permissions.

3. Manage and secure AI services in Microsoft 365

35–40%

Enable and manage Microsoft 365 Copilot

The Microsoft 365 admin center provides the Copilot readiness report (Reports > Usage > Microsoft Copilot), showing each user's license eligibility, update channel status, and per-app usage to help plan a rollout. The Microsoft 365 Admin agent complements this by answering readiness questions in natural language and proposing changes that always need the admin's confirmation.
SharePoint Advanced Management provides the Content Management Assessment hub and data access governance reports to detect overshared content before enabling Copilot. Controls such as Restricted Access Control and Restricted Content Discovery then limit access or Copilot visibility, and Purview Data Security Posture Management adds policies that detect, and sometimes block, sensitive data processing.
The Allow web search in Copilot policy, available only in Cloud Policy service for Microsoft 365, controls whether Copilot and Copilot Chat can draw on Bing to ground their responses, with options to enable it, disable it, or disable it only in Work mode. A user-level Web content toggle also lets individuals turn it off; in GCC and DoD, web search stays off by default until the policy is explicitly configured.
Microsoft 365 Copilot Search requires no initial setup: users with an eligible license get it automatically from the Search module, and connectors, bookmarks, and acronyms already configured for Microsoft Search carry over unchanged. From Copilot > Search in the admin center, administrators publish, save as draft, schedule, or exclude acronyms and bookmarks, either individually or through bulk CSV import.
From Copilot > Settings, administrators decide whether users can self-acquire Copilot (allow, trials only, or do not allow), whether admin staff can use Copilot inside the Microsoft 365, Exchange, SharePoint, and Teams admin centers, and whether Copilot generates new images or only offers stock images. The Copilot AI disclaimer requires the AI Administrator role, and release preferences require the Global Administrator role.

Implement and manage agents in Microsoft 365 and Agent 365

Microsoft Entra Agent ID governs agent identity lifecycles by requiring a human sponsor accountable for access and retention decisions. If a sponsor leaves the organization, sponsorship automatically transfers to their manager. Lifecycle Workflows adds specific mover or leaver tasks to notify people of these changes or actively transfer sponsorship, and each agent management task (viewing, managing, creating blueprints, configuring Conditional Access) requires a distinct Microsoft Entra role.
Access packages grant agent identities security group memberships, Microsoft Entra roles, and OAuth API permissions in a standardized, auditable, time-bound way, requestable by the agent itself, its sponsor, or through direct administrator assignment. Conditional Access evaluates agent access differently depending on the pattern used: on-behalf-of flows target the user, the client credentials flow targets the agent identity, and the agent's user account flow targets that account, with documented boundaries for when enforcement doesn't apply.
In Microsoft Entra Agent ID, owners are technical administrators (individual users or service principals, never groups) who can modify credentials and re-enable disabled identities, while sponsors provide business accountability with permissions limited to nondestructive actions. For agents built with Microsoft 365 Copilot Agent Builder, any number of individual users can hold the owner ("Can edit") role with equal rights, and administrators can add, remove, or reassign owners from the Microsoft 365 admin center.
The Agent settings page in the Microsoft 365 admin center centralizes agent governance: Allowed agent types decides which agent categories appear in the catalog, Sharing controls sharing of agents built with Agent Builder, User access decides who in the organization can use agents, and Agent 365 policy templates bundle predefined controls from Entra, Purview, SharePoint, and Defender that apply only to new agent activations, not retroactively.
The agent Registry, at Agents > All Agents > Registry, gives a centralized view of every agent in the tenant, grouped into Microsoft agents, external partner-built agents, agents published by the organization, and agents shared by creator. Admins can filter by status, channel, and data source, export the inventory, identify ownerless agents, and review aggregated risk signals from Entra, Defender, and Purview.

Secure and govern agents by using Agent 365

In the Microsoft 365 admin center, an agent's Security tab lets administrators monitor its activity, drawing on Microsoft Purview protections. Activity is reviewed with Activity explorer, which shows label activity across Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive, and endpoint devices, and administrators can also search the unified audit log, which covers agent-to-human, human-to-agent, agent-to-tools, and agent-to-agent interactions.
An agent's Security tab points to AI observability, inside Data Security Posture Management for AI, for a centralized view of risky agent activity such as oversharing, exfiltration, and unethical behavior, prioritized by Insider Risk Management. Microsoft Purview also lets administrators protect agent instances with DLP, sensitivity labels, Insider Risk Management, and eDiscovery, by explicitly treating the agent instance like a user in each policy.
From an agent's Security tab, if an AI baseline assessment is available, an administrator can evaluate its compliance gaps using Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager. Compliance Manager offers premium regulatory templates for AI regulations, such as the EU AI Act and the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, and every Agent 365 agent instance is automatically included in those assessments when it's created.

Monitor AI services in Microsoft 365

In the Microsoft 365 admin center, administrators manage AI service spending from Billing > Cost management, where they review costs and create budgets, and from Copilot > Cost Management, where they configure Copilot Credit spending policies for services such as Cowork. Pay-as-you-go services like Copilot Chat are activated through billing policies linking an Azure subscription to a group of users.
The Microsoft Copilot usage report, under Reports > Usage > Microsoft Copilot in the Microsoft 365 admin center, shows enabled and active users, the adoption rate, and prompts submitted, plus an adoption-by-app breakdown (Word, Excel, Teams, Outlook, and more) revealing which workloads adopt Copilot most strongly. A user counts as active only when performing an intentional action, such as submitting a prompt.
The Copilot Control System organizes Copilot adoption measurement and reporting across several tools: the Copilot Dashboard in Viva Insights shows adoption trends per app and productivity impact; the Advanced Insights Analyst Workbench builds custom Power BI queries and reports; and the Power Platform admin center, together with Copilot Studio Analytics, provide consumption and performance metrics for agents.
Administrators check the health of Microsoft Copilot and other Microsoft 365 services under Health > Service health in the Microsoft 365 admin center. This page distinguishes between advisories, which affect some users while the service stays available, and incidents, which leave a major function unavailable, and lets admins configure email notifications for one or more services.

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