MS-102 case studies
MS-102 · Put your knowledge to work in context.
MS-102: Microsoft 365 Administrator is the one required exam for the Microsoft 365 Certified: Administrator Expert credential. Microsoft frames the role as the integrating hub across Microsoft 365 workloads - someone who coordinates with architects and with the administrators responsible for infrastructure, identity, security, compliance, endpoints, and applications. The MS-102 case studies are 5 cases and about 4,407 words.
1Cutting 14 permanent Global Administrators down to four without breaking consent or on-call alerting
Northwind Logistics runs one Microsoft 365 E3 tenant with 2,800 licensed users on a single verified domain. An external audit found 14 Global Administrators, all permanently assigned, with no approval evidence.
812 words, about 4 min2A Conditional Access baseline where the real constraints are shared tablets, service accounts, and an unapproved P2 budget
Fabrikam has 1,200 employees licensed Microsoft 365 E3 and 250 warehouse staff licensed Microsoft 365 F3. Per-user MFA is still set to Enabled for 800 users from a 2019 rollout.
869 words, about 4 min3A two-analyst SOC drowning in Defender XDR incidents while servers do not block and macOS is dark
Tailspin Toys licenses Microsoft 365 E5 for 1,500 users. Defender for Endpoint covers 1,500 Windows 11 laptops, 60 macOS devices, and 40 Windows Server 2019 file servers onboarded through Intune.
942 words, about 5 min4Seven-year retention versus a project that must be destroyed, and a DLP policy that has never matched anything
Litware Financial has 3,000 users on Microsoft 365 E3, with 400 E5 licences held by finance, legal, and the executive team. The regulator requires seven-year retention of all Exchange and Teams content, immutability for the first two years, and defensible deletion afterwards.
863 words, about 4 min5600 guest accounts, a quarterly attestation the licences may not support, and 15 guests holding site-collection admin
Proseware collaborates with 40 partner organisations. The tenant holds 600 guest accounts; 480 were created by business users under the default 'anyone in the organisation can invite guests' setting, 90 have not signed in for 13 months, and 15 hold SharePoint site-collection administrator on partner-facing sites.
921 words, about 5 min