Pass Your Microsoft MCSE 70-331 Exam Easy!

Microsoft 70-331 (Core Solutions of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013) exam dumps vce, practice test questions, study guide & video training course to study and pass quickly and easily. Microsoft 70-331 Core Solutions of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 exam dumps & practice test questions and answers. You need avanset vce exam simulator in order to study the Microsoft MCSE 70-331 certification exam dumps & Microsoft MCSE 70-331 practice test questions in vce format.

An Introduction to the Microsoft 70-331 Exam

Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 was a landmark platform for enterprise collaboration, document management, and web content publishing. It empowered organizations to build rich, integrated solutions for team productivity and information sharing. The Microsoft 70-331 exam, "Core Solutions of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013," was the key certification for IT professionals responsible for designing, deploying, and managing these powerful environments. Passing this exam signified that an individual possessed the core skills to build and maintain a healthy, performant, and secure SharePoint 2013 farm.

Although the 70-331 exam is now retired, the architectural principles and core functionalities it covered are foundational to understanding the entire SharePoint ecosystem, including its modern successor, SharePoint Online. For professionals still managing on-premises SharePoint 2013 farms or those seeking to understand the evolution of the platform, this knowledge remains highly relevant. This five-part series will serve as a comprehensive guide to the topics covered in the 70-331 exam, starting with the fundamental architecture of a SharePoint 2013 farm and the key capabilities that made it such a powerful tool for business.

Understanding the SharePoint 2013 Architecture

A deep understanding of the SharePoint 2013 architecture is the starting point for any professional preparing for the 70-331 exam. SharePoint is built on a three-tier farm model, which consists of a Web Front End (WFE) tier, an Application tier, and a Database tier. The Web Front End servers are responsible for handling user requests, rendering web pages, and serving content. They are the primary point of contact for end-users and are typically placed in a load-balanced configuration to ensure high availability and performance.

The Application tier is where the backend work and heavy processing occur. These servers run the various service applications that provide the rich functionality of SharePoint. This includes services for Search, User Profiles, Managed Metadata, and more. In a medium to large farm, specific servers are often dedicated to running these intensive services to optimize performance and to scale the farm effectively. The 70-331 exam required a solid understanding of how to plan the distribution of these service applications across the servers in the Application tier.

The Database tier is the foundation of the entire farm and is hosted on Microsoft SQL Server. This tier stores all the data for the SharePoint environment. This includes configuration data for the farm itself in the Configuration Database, and all user content, such as documents and list items, in one or more Content Databases. The health and performance of the SQL Server are absolutely critical to the health of the entire SharePoint farm. Understanding the roles of these three tiers and their interaction is a fundamental concept.

Who was the Ideal Candidate for the 70-331 Exam?

The 70-331 exam was designed for experienced IT professionals who were responsible for the technical management of a SharePoint Server 2013 environment. The ideal candidate was a SharePoint administrator, a systems engineer, or a technical consultant tasked with designing, implementing, and maintaining a SharePoint infrastructure. These individuals needed a broad and deep skill set that spanned across server administration, networking, database management, and security principles. The exam was a rigorous test of their ability to handle the complexities of a multi-server farm deployment.

Candidates were expected to have a solid understanding of the prerequisite technologies upon which SharePoint is built. This included hands-on experience with Windows Server, particularly managing Internet Information Services (IIS). Strong knowledge of networking concepts, such as DNS, load balancing, and firewalls, was also essential. Furthermore, a good working knowledge of Active Directory for user authentication and authorization, and Microsoft SQL Server for database administration, was a non-negotiable prerequisite.

The 70-331 exam was not an entry-level test. It was intended for professionals with at least a year of practical, hands-on experience in deploying and managing SharePoint farms. The questions were often scenario-based, requiring the candidate to apply their knowledge to solve real-world design and administration challenges. It was the benchmark certification for anyone wanting to prove their expertise as a core SharePoint 2013 infrastructure specialist.

Key Features and Capabilities of SharePoint 2013

To succeed on the 70-331 exam, you needed a solid understanding of the key features and capabilities that SharePoint 2013 offered to the business. At its core, SharePoint is a powerful platform for document management. This includes the use of document libraries with features like major and minor versioning, content approval workflows, and check-in/check-out functionality to prevent conflicts. The exam required knowledge of how to plan and configure these features to meet specific business requirements for content control and lifecycle management.

Social and collaboration features were significantly enhanced in SharePoint 2013, and this was a key topic area. This included My Sites, which provided each user with a personal site containing a profile, a blog, and a personal document library (OneDrive for Business). The platform also introduced Community Sites, which provided a forum-like experience for discussions and knowledge sharing. Understanding how to configure the User Profile Service to enable these social features was a critical skill.

The Search functionality in SharePoint 2013 was completely re-architected and became a powerful and scalable search engine. The 70-331 exam tested your ability to configure the Search service application, create content sources to crawl different types of content, and customize the search experience with features like query rules and result types. Other key capabilities covered included Web Content Management (WCM) for building and managing public-facing websites and intranets, and Business Connectivity Services (BCS) for surfacing data from external systems.

Navigating the 70-331 Exam Format and Objectives

Being familiar with the exam's format and the skills it measured was a critical first step in building a successful study plan. The 70-331 exam was a proctored test that consisted of 40 to 60 questions, and candidates were given a 120-minute time limit. The question formats were varied and included standard multiple-choice, drag-and-drop, and, most notably, case studies. The case study format presented a detailed business and technical scenario, followed by a series of questions related to that scenario. This required strong analytical and reading comprehension skills.

The official skills measured, or objectives, for the 70-331 exam were divided into four main categories. The first, and most heavily weighted, was "Design a SharePoint Topology." This section focused on planning the logical and physical architecture, designing a security and authentication strategy, and planning for service applications. This reflected the exam's focus on the "core solutions" aspect, emphasizing design and planning.

The second section was "Plan Security," which delved deeper into planning and configuring authorization and farm-level security. The third section, "Install and Configure SharePoint Farms," covered the hands-on tasks of deploying the farm, configuring web applications and service applications, and managing site collections. The final section, "Create and Configure Web Applications and Site Collections," focused on the specific tasks of provisioning and managing these core SharePoint containers. Your study should be meticulously aligned with these official objectives.

The Business Value of a SharePoint Environment and Certification

Understanding the business value of SharePoint 2013 provides important context for the technical knowledge tested in the 70-331 exam. For businesses, SharePoint served as a central hub for team collaboration. It allowed project teams to create dedicated team sites where they could share documents, manage tasks, and maintain a project calendar, all in one secure, version-controlled location. This improved teamwork, reduced the reliance on email for document sharing, and created a single source of truth for project information.

The platform also provided powerful tools for business process automation. Using SharePoint Designer and workflows, organizations could automate common business processes like document approvals, travel requests, or employee onboarding. This reduced manual effort, improved consistency, and provided a full audit trail for the process. The powerful search capabilities also delivered significant value by making it easier for employees to find the information and expertise they needed to do their jobs, breaking down information silos.

A professional who had passed the 70-331 exam was instrumental in helping an organization realize these benefits. Their expertise in designing, deploying, and maintaining the SharePoint farm ensured that the platform was stable, secure, and configured to meet the specific needs of the business. This certification was a clear indicator that the individual had the skills to manage the critical infrastructure that powered the organization's collaboration and information management strategies.

Initial Steps for Your 70-331 Exam Preparation

To begin a structured preparation for the 70-331 exam, a few initial steps were crucial. The very first action was to download the official "Skills Measured" document from the Microsoft Learning website. This document was the definitive blueprint for the exam. It detailed every objective and sub-skill that was in scope. This blueprint should have been used as a master checklist to guide your studies, track your progress, and identify areas that required more attention.

Next, it was essential to gather the appropriate study materials. For a Microsoft exam of this era, the primary and most authoritative sources of information were the articles on Microsoft TechNet and MSDN. These online libraries contained the complete product documentation, architectural guidance, and step-by-step procedural guides for SharePoint 2013. Books from reputable publishers and video training courses were also valuable supplements, but the official Microsoft documentation was the ultimate source of truth.

Finally, and most importantly, was the need to build a hands-on lab environment. Theoretical knowledge was absolutely insufficient to pass the 70-331 exam. You needed to have practical, hands-on experience. This meant building a multi-server SharePoint 2013 farm, typically using a virtualization platform like Hyper-V. The lab should include a domain controller, a SQL Server, and at least two SharePoint servers. The process of building, configuring, and inevitably troubleshooting this lab environment was the single most effective study method.

Deep Dive into Designing and Planning a SharePoint 2013 Farm for the 70-331 Exam

Welcome to the second part of our detailed series on the Microsoft 70-331 exam. In the first installment, we established a foundational understanding of the SharePoint 2013 platform, its core architecture, and the overall structure and objectives of the exam. With that essential groundwork laid, we now turn our focus to the most heavily weighted and arguably most critical aspect of the exam: the design and planning phase of a SharePoint deployment. A successful SharePoint farm is built on a foundation of careful and thorough planning.

This part will provide a deep dive into the strategic decisions that must be made before a single server is installed. We will explore how to design the logical and physical architecture, how to plan for a secure authentication and authorization model, and the critical process of designing a service application architecture. We will also cover planning for high availability and disaster recovery. The 70-331 exam placed a strong emphasis on these design skills, reflecting its focus on creating robust "core solutions."

Designing the Physical and Logical Architecture

The first step in designing a SharePoint farm is to translate the business requirements into a logical architecture. This is a key skill tested in the 70-331 exam. The logical architecture defines how SharePoint will be structured to present information to users. This involves planning the hierarchy of web applications, site collections, and sites. A web application is the top-level container in IIS that hosts one or more site collections. You might create different web applications for different purposes, such as one for the intranet and another for an external-facing website, each with different security and governance policies.

Below the web application are site collections, which are the primary units of content ownership and administration. You must plan how you will structure these site collections to align with the business's departmental or project structure. The information architecture, which includes the design of content types, site columns, and navigation, is also a key part of this logical design. A well-designed logical architecture makes the SharePoint environment intuitive for users and easier for administrators to manage.

Once the logical architecture is defined, you must design the physical architecture to support it. This involves determining the number of servers required in each tier (Web Front End, Application, Database) to meet the performance and availability requirements. You will need to decide which SharePoint server roles will be combined on which servers in smaller farms, or how they will be distributed across dedicated servers in larger farms. This physical design, whether on physical hardware or virtual machines, is the blueprint for building the farm, a core topic for the 70-331 exam.

Planning and Configuring Authentication

Authentication is the process of verifying a user's identity, and planning for it is a critical security task that was heavily featured on the 70-331 exam. SharePoint 2013 made a significant architectural shift by embracing claims-based authentication as the default and preferred model. In this model, a user presents a set of "claims" (e.g., their username, email address, group memberships) that have been issued by a trusted identity provider. SharePoint then uses these claims to determine who the user is.

The most common implementation of claims-based authentication in a corporate environment is Windows Claims. In this mode, Active Directory acts as the trusted identity provider. SharePoint trusts the Kerberos or NTLM tokens issued by Active Directory to authenticate the user. You must understand the difference between these protocols and the scenarios where each is appropriate. For the 70-331 exam, you needed to know the steps to create a web application using Windows Claims authentication.

SharePoint 2013 also provided robust support for federated identity through SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language) claims. This allows users to authenticate using other identity systems, such as Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) or other third-party identity providers. This is used to provide access to SharePoint for external partners or to enable single sign-on across different platforms. Understanding the concepts of claims, identity providers, and the different authentication modes was essential for the security planning questions on the 70-331 exam.

Planning and Configuring Authorization and Security

Once a user has been authenticated, the next step is authorization: determining what the user is allowed to do. The 70-331 exam required a deep understanding of SharePoint's authorization model. The core of this model is based on a hierarchy of securable objects. You can grant permissions at the level of a site collection, a site, a list or library, or even an individual item. A key principle is that permissions are, by default, inherited from the parent object.

To simplify management, you should avoid assigning permissions directly to individual users. Instead, the best practice is to use SharePoint Groups. A SharePoint Group is a collection of users. You grant permissions to the group, and then you add or remove users from the group as needed. SharePoint provides several default groups, such as Owners, Members, and Visitors, each with a corresponding default Permission Level.

A Permission Level is a collection of individual rights, such as "Add Items" or "Edit Items." SharePoint comes with predefined permission levels like "Full Control," "Contribute," and "Read." You can also create custom permission levels to meet specific security requirements. The best practice is to always follow the principle of least privilege, granting users only the minimum permissions they need to perform their job functions. A solid grasp of securable objects, SharePoint groups, and permission levels was fundamental for the 70-331 exam.

Designing a Service Application Architecture

The rich functionality of SharePoint 2013 is delivered through a set of shared services known as Service Applications. A key design task, and a major topic for the 70-331 exam, was planning the service application architecture. Each service application provides a specific function, such as the Search Service Application, the User Profile Service Application, or the Managed Metadata Service Application. As an architect, you must determine which services are required to meet the business's needs.

Once you have identified the necessary services, you need to plan how they will be provisioned. Each service application runs in a dedicated application pool in IIS, which provides process isolation. You must plan your application pool strategy, often grouping services with similar performance or security characteristics into the same pool. You also need to plan the service application databases that will be created on your SQL Server.

A powerful feature of the service application architecture is the ability to share services across different web applications and even across different SharePoint farms. You can publish a service application from one farm and have another farm consume it. This is particularly useful in large enterprise environments. The 70-331 exam would often present scenarios that required you to design an optimal service application topology, including decisions about which services to deploy and how to group them for performance and manageability.

Planning for High Availability and Disaster Recovery

Ensuring business continuity is a critical aspect of any enterprise platform, and the 70-331 exam required a solid understanding of the high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) options for SharePoint 2013. High availability is about providing redundancy within a single data center to protect against the failure of an individual component, such as a single server. This is achieved by having multiple servers in each tier of the farm.

For the Web Front End and Application tiers, HA is achieved by having at least two servers for each role, with a load balancer distributing traffic between them. If one server fails, the other can continue to service requests. For the Database tier, HA is achieved by using Microsoft SQL Server's high availability features. The most recommended solution for SharePoint 2013 was SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Groups, which provides a high-availability and disaster-recovery solution for your databases.

Disaster recovery, on the other hand, is about protecting against the loss of an entire data center. The primary strategy for SharePoint DR is to build a secondary, standby farm in a different geographical location. You can then use techniques like log shipping or, more preferably, the database replication provided by SQL Server AlwaysOn, to keep the databases in the standby farm synchronized with the primary farm. Understanding the difference between HA and DR and the key technologies for each was a core competency for the 70-331 exam.

Designing an Effective Information Architecture

An effective information architecture (IA) is what makes a SharePoint environment usable and valuable to the business. While not a purely technical topic, planning the IA was a key part of the design process covered in the 70-331 exam. The information architecture is the blueprint for how the content in SharePoint will be organized, structured, and labeled. A good IA ensures that users can find the information they are looking for easily and intuitively.

A key part of the IA is the design of the site hierarchy. This involves planning the structure of site collections and the sites within them to reflect the organization's structure or business processes. You also need to plan the navigation, including the top link bar and the Quick Launch menu, to provide users with a clear and consistent way to move through the site.

The building blocks of a good IA are Content Types and Site Columns. A Site Column is a reusable definition for a piece of metadata, such as a "Project Manager" or "Document Status." A Content Type is a reusable collection of settings for a specific type of content, such as a "Project Report." It bundles together a set of site columns and other settings, like a document template. By using content types, you can ensure that similar content is managed consistently across the entire farm. The 70-331 exam would test your understanding of these critical IA components.

Planning for Social and Collaboration Features

SharePoint 2013 placed a strong emphasis on social and collaboration features, and planning for their successful deployment was a key topic for the 70-331 exam. The central component for social features was the User Profile Service Application. A critical planning task was to determine how user profile information would be populated. The most common method was to configure User Profile Synchronization to import user data from Active Directory into the SharePoint profile database. This required careful planning of which organizational units to sync and how to map AD attributes to SharePoint profile properties.

Another major planning area was My Sites. My Sites provided each user with their own personal site, which included their social profile, a blog, and their personal document library. You needed to plan for the My Site Host, which is a dedicated site collection that serves as the root for all personal sites. You also had to plan for the capacity required to store the content from potentially thousands of individual user sites.

Finally, you needed to plan for the community and team collaboration features. This included planning for Community Sites, which provided rich discussion forum capabilities. For team collaboration, you needed a governance plan for how team sites would be requested, created, and managed. This often involved creating site templates to ensure that new team sites were created with a consistent structure and set of features. The 70-331 exam would often present scenarios requiring you to make design decisions about these collaboration features.

Installing, Configuring, and Managing a SharePoint 2013 Farm for the 70-331 Exam

Welcome to the third part of our in-depth series on the Microsoft 70-331 exam. In the previous section, we focused on the critical planning and design phase of a SharePoint 2013 deployment. We covered how to design the architecture, plan for security, and create a robust service application topology. With a solid plan in place, we now transition to the hands-on, practical skills required to build, configure, and maintain the SharePoint farm. This is where the architectural blueprint becomes a functioning reality.

This part will provide a deep dive into the core administrative tasks of installing and configuring SharePoint Server 2013. We will walk through the essential preparation steps, the installation process itself, and the crucial tasks of configuring service applications and web applications. We will also explore the management of site collections, user profiles, and the ongoing monitoring and maintenance of the farm's health. These practical, hands-on skills were a major component of the 70-331 exam and are the daily work of a SharePoint administrator.

Preparing the Environment for SharePoint Installation

Before you can run the SharePoint installer, you must meticulously prepare the server environment. This preparation phase is a critical prerequisite for a successful deployment, and the 70-331 exam required a thorough understanding of these steps. The first task is to prepare Active Directory. SharePoint requires several dedicated service accounts to run its application pools and services. A key best practice is to create these accounts in Active Directory beforehand, following the principle of least privilege, so that each account has only the permissions it needs.

Next, you must prepare the Microsoft SQL Server instance that will host the SharePoint databases. This involves ensuring the SQL Server is installed and configured correctly. A critical step is to configure the MAXDOP (Max Degree of Parallelism) setting to 1 for the SQL Server instance. This is a mandatory requirement for SharePoint to prevent performance issues. You also need to ensure that the account you will use to run the SharePoint setup has the necessary permissions on the SQL Server, specifically the dbcreator and securityadmin server roles.

Finally, you must prepare the Windows Server machines that will become the SharePoint servers. This involves ensuring the operating system is up-to-date and that all the necessary roles and features, such as the Web Server (IIS) role, are installed. SharePoint 2013 provided a convenient Prerequisite Installer (prerequisiteinstaller.exe) that could automate the installation of most of these required components. Understanding these AD, SQL, and Windows Server prerequisites was a fundamental requirement for the 70-331 exam.

Installing SharePoint Server 2013

With the environment prepared, you can proceed with the installation of the SharePoint Server 2013 binaries. This process, while seemingly straightforward, has several key steps that were tested on the 70-331 exam. The process begins by running the setup.exe from the SharePoint installation media. This will guide you through installing the product files onto the server. You will need to enter your product key during this process. This step must be performed on every server that will be part of the SharePoint farm.

After the binaries are installed on all servers, the next critical step is to run the SharePoint Products Configuration Wizard (psconfigui.exe or its command-line equivalent, psconfig.exe). This wizard is what actually creates the farm or joins a server to an existing farm. On the first server, you will choose the option to "Create a new server farm." This will prompt you for the database server name and the credentials for the farm access account. This process creates the crucial SharePoint Configuration Database.

On all subsequent servers in your farm, you will run the same wizard, but this time you will choose the option to "Connect to an existing server farm." You will provide the name of the configuration database and the farm passphrase that you set when you created the farm. This will join the server to the farm, and its configuration will now be managed centrally. A solid understanding of this two-stage process—installing binaries and then creating or joining the farm—was essential for the 70-331 exam.

Configuring and Managing Service Applications

Once the SharePoint farm is created, it is essentially an empty shell. The rich functionality of SharePoint is provided by the service applications, and the 70-331 exam required you to be proficient in their configuration. Service applications are managed from the Central Administration website. To create a new service application, you will typically navigate to the "Manage service applications" page and use the ribbon to create a new instance of the service you need, such as the Search Service Application or the Managed Metadata Service.

The process of creating a service application involves several key steps. You will need to provide a name for the service, specify a dedicated application pool for it to run under, and provide the names for the one or more databases that the service will create on the SQL Server. For example, creating the User Profile Service Application creates several databases, including the Profile, Social, and Sync databases.

Managing service applications is an ongoing task. This includes monitoring their health, configuring their specific settings (such as setting up crawl schedules for search), and managing their associations. A service application association links a service application to a specific web application, making its services available to the sites within that web application. The ability to create, configure, and manage the associations for key service applications like Search, User Profiles, and Managed Metadata was a core competency for the 70-331 exam.

Creating and Configuring Web Applications

A web application is the top-level container for all sites and content in SharePoint. It is represented as a website in IIS and has its own unique domain name, application pool, and configuration settings. The 70-331 exam required you to know the detailed process of creating and configuring web applications through Central Administration. When you create a new web application, you are presented with a detailed configuration page with several important sections.

First, you must specify the IIS website settings, including the port number and optional host header, which defines the URL for the web application. A critical section is the security configuration, where you will select the authentication provider. For SharePoint 2013, this would typically be "Claims Based Authentication," and you would then specify the claims type, such as Windows Authentication (NTLM or Kerberos).

You will also need to specify the name of the content database that will be created on the SQL Server to store all the content for this web application. Finally, you will select the service application connections, or association, for the web application, which determines which service applications it can consume. When you create the web application, you are also prompted to create the root site collection for it. A thorough understanding of all these settings was essential for the 70-331 exam.

Managing Site Collections and Site Features

A site collection is a set of websites that have the same owner and share administrative settings. It is the primary unit of content management and governance in SharePoint. The 70-331 exam tested your ability to manage the lifecycle of site collections. You can create new site collections from Central Administration or via PowerShell. When you create a site collection, you must specify its URL, select a template (like "Team Site" or "Community Site"), and assign a primary and secondary site collection administrator.

An important aspect of managing site collections is setting and monitoring quotas. Quotas allow you to limit the amount of storage a site collection can consume. This is a critical governance control to prevent a single site collection from using up all the available space in a content database. You can define quota templates and apply them to new site collections as they are created.

The functionality available within a site collection is controlled by Features. SharePoint has a large number of built-in features that can be activated or deactivated to enable or disable specific capabilities. For example, there is a feature to enable the publishing infrastructure for web content management, or a feature to enable workflows. These features can be scoped at the farm, web application, site collection, or site level. Knowing how to manage site collections and their associated features was a key administrative skill for the 70-331 exam.

Managing User Profiles and My Sites

The social and personalization features of SharePoint 2013 were heavily dependent on the User Profile Service Application. The 70-331 exam required a deep understanding of its configuration and management. The first critical task after creating the service application is to set up User Profile Synchronization. This is the process of importing user profile information, such as department, manager, and contact details, from a directory service like Active Directory into the SharePoint profile database.

This involves creating a synchronization connection to your Active Directory domain. You must specify which containers (Organizational Units) to sync and how to map the attributes from Active Directory to the properties in the SharePoint user profile. Once configured, you can run a full synchronization to perform the initial import, followed by incremental synchronizations to keep the profiles up-to-date.

Once user profiles are populated, you can configure My Sites. This requires creating a dedicated web application and a special site collection called the My Site Host. You then configure the "My Site Settings" in the User Profile Service Application to point to this host. When a user accesses their My Site for the first time, SharePoint will automatically provision a personal site collection for them under the My Site Host. The ability to correctly configure this entire ecosystem of profile sync and My Sites was a major topic on the 70-331 exam.

Monitoring and Maintaining a SharePoint Farm

An essential part of a SharePoint administrator's job is to proactively monitor the health of the farm and perform regular maintenance. The 70-331 exam tested your knowledge of the tools and procedures for these tasks. The primary built-in tool for monitoring farm health is the SharePoint Health Analyzer. This tool runs a set of predefined health rules against your farm and reports on any configuration or performance issues it finds. Administrators must regularly review the Health Analyzer reports in Central Administration and take corrective action.

For detailed troubleshooting, an administrator must be familiar with the Unified Logging Service (ULS) logs. These are detailed diagnostic logs that are written by every SharePoint component. You need to know where to find these logs on the server file systems and how to use tools like the ULS Viewer to correlate and filter the log entries to diagnose a problem.

Regular maintenance is also critical. This includes tasks like reviewing timer job history to ensure that internal maintenance jobs are running successfully. The most important maintenance task is performing regular backups of your farm. The 70-331 exam required you to know how to perform a full farm backup using either the tools in Central Administration or the Backup-SPFarm PowerShell cmdlet. This backup is your ultimate safety net for disaster recovery.

Deep Dive into Search, Business Connectivity Services, and Enterprise Content Management for the 70-331 Exam

Welcome to the fourth part of our detailed series preparing you for the Microsoft 70-331 exam. In the previous installments, we have laid a strong foundation, covering the initial design and planning of a SharePoint 2013 farm and then moving into the practical, hands-on skills of installation, configuration, and daily management. With the core farm now built and operational, we can explore some of the more advanced and powerful capabilities that SharePoint offers.

This part will focus on several key service applications and feature sets that deliver significant business value and were important topics on the 70-331 exam. We will perform a deep dive into the completely re-architected Search service of SharePoint 2013, explore how Business Connectivity Services (BCS) can be used to integrate external data, and cover the essential features of Enterprise Content Management (ECM), including the crucial Managed Metadata service. A strong grasp of these advanced workloads is essential for any professional aspiring to be a SharePoint solutions expert.

The SharePoint 2013 Search Architecture

The search functionality in SharePoint 2013 was a massive improvement over its predecessors, and a deep understanding of its new architecture was a critical requirement for the 70-331 exam. The Search Service Application is composed of a set of interconnected components that work together to crawl content, build an index, and serve query results. These components can be scaled out across multiple servers to provide high performance and fault tolerance in large farms.

The main components of the search architecture include the Crawl Component, which is responsible for fetching content from various content sources. The Content Processing Component (CPC) then takes the crawled items and transforms them into a format that can be indexed. The Analytics Processing Component runs deep analytics on the content and user behavior to improve search relevance. The Index Component is responsible for storing the search index and serving query results. Finally, the Query Processing Component receives queries from users, analyzes them, and forwards them to the index components.

As an administrator, you needed to understand the role of each of these components and how to design a search topology by deploying these components across the servers in your farm. For example, in a large farm, you might have dedicated servers for crawling and dedicated servers for hosting the index. The 70-331 exam would often present scenarios that required you to design an appropriate search topology to meet specific performance or scale requirements.

Configuring Search Content Sources and Crawls

For search to be useful, you must first tell it what content to include in its index. This is done by configuring Content Sources within the Search Service Application. The 70-331 exam required you to be proficient in this configuration. A content source is a definition that specifies a set of start addresses to crawl, the type of content to be found there, and the schedule for crawling it. SharePoint 2013 can crawl a wide variety of content.

The most common content source type is for SharePoint sites, which you would configure to crawl all the web applications in your local farm. You can also create content sources to crawl other locations, such as standard file shares on a network server, public websites on the internet, or even data from external systems via Business Connectivity Services. For each content source, you must configure crawl schedules.

You will typically configure two types of schedules. A Full Crawl performs a complete crawl of all the content in the source. This is done initially and then periodically thereafter, perhaps once a week. An Incremental Crawl is run much more frequently, perhaps every hour, and it only crawls the content that has changed since the last crawl. This is much more efficient and ensures that the search index is kept relatively up-to-date. The ability to create and manage these content sources and crawl schedules was a core administrative skill for the 70-331 exam.

Customizing the Search Experience

Beyond simply crawling and indexing content, a key part of the administrator's role was to customize and improve the search experience for end-users. The 70-331 exam tested your knowledge of the tools available for this purpose. One of the most powerful tools was the Query Rule. A query rule allows you to define a condition, such as a query that contains a specific keyword, and then trigger an action. For example, if a user searches for "HR Policies," you could create a query rule that promotes a specific result, like the main HR policy page, to the top of the search results.

Another key customization area was the Search Schema. The search schema controls how content is processed and how it can be used in queries. It consists of crawled properties, which are the metadata automatically discovered during a crawl, and managed properties, which are the properties that can be used in search queries and refiners. A common task was to map a crawled property, like "ProjectAuthor" from a document, to a managed property so that users could search for all documents where the Project Author is a specific person.

You could also create and configure Result Sources. A result source is a pre-defined search that can be used to narrow the scope of a query to a specific subset of the content. For example, you could create a result source that only returns PDF documents from a specific site collection. These customized result sources could then be used to create dedicated search pages or "search verticals." A solid understanding of these customization tools was essential for the 70-331 exam.

Introduction to Business Connectivity Services (BCS)

Many organizations have critical business data stored in systems outside of SharePoint, such as in a SQL Server database, an Oracle database, or a custom line-of-business application. Business Connectivity Services (BCS) is the SharePoint feature that allows you to connect to these external systems and surface their data within SharePoint. A conceptual understanding of BCS and its use cases was an important topic for the 70-331 exam.

BCS acts as a bridge between SharePoint and the external data source. It allows you to create an "external content type," which is a reusable definition of the connection and the data structure of the external system. This external content type essentially describes the schema of the external data, such as the tables and columns in a SQL database. Once this definition is created, you can use it to bring the external data into SharePoint in various ways.

The most common way to use an external content type is to create an External List. An external list looks and feels just like a regular SharePoint list, but its data is not stored in SharePoint. Instead, it is a live view of the data from the external system. Users can view, search, and in some cases, even edit the external data directly from the SharePoint interface. This provides a powerful way to integrate line-of-business data into your collaboration portal, a key concept for the 70-331 exam.

Configuring BCS and External Content Types

While the concept of BCS is powerful, the 70-331 exam also required a basic understanding of the steps involved in its configuration. The process begins with configuring the Business Data Connectivity Service Application. This service application is the engine that runs BCS. You must also configure the security for BCS, which is often done using the Secure Store Service. The Secure Store Service provides a way to securely store the credentials needed to connect to the external data source.

Once the service applications are configured, the next step is to create the External Content Type (ECT). This is the definition of the connection to the external system. For SharePoint 2013, the primary tool for creating ECTs was SharePoint Designer. In SharePoint Designer, you could create a new ECT, specify the data source type (e.g., SQL Server), provide the connection details, and then select the tables or views you wanted to work with. SharePoint Designer would then introspect the data source and allow you to define the operations (e.g., Read, Create, Update, Delete) for the ECT.

After the ECT was created and published to the BDC service application, you could then go to a SharePoint site and create an External List based on that ECT. This would create a list in SharePoint that displayed the data from the external source. Understanding this high-level workflow, from configuring the service to creating the ECT and the external list, was the level of detail expected for the 70-331 exam.

Managing Enterprise Content Management (ECM)

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is a broad term for the features and technologies used to manage the entire lifecycle of an organization's content, from creation to archival and disposal. The 70-331 exam required knowledge of several key ECM features within SharePoint 2013. A core feature for managing related documents as a single unit is the Document Set. A document set is a special type of folder that allows you to manage a group of related documents as a single piece of work. For example, you could have a document set for a sales proposal that contains a presentation, a spreadsheet, and a contract document.

Another key ECM feature is the Content Organizer. The Content Organizer can be used to automatically route documents to the correct library and folder based on their metadata. You can create rules that say, for example, "if a document is a contract and its status is approved, then move it to the final contracts library." This helps to automate records management and ensures that content is stored in the correct location based on business rules.

The eDiscovery features in SharePoint 2013 were also a significant part of its ECM capabilities. The eDiscovery Center provided a central place to manage the process of finding, preserving, and exporting content for legal discovery or compliance audits. You could create eDiscovery cases, define sources to search (such as SharePoint sites and Exchange mailboxes), place content on hold to preserve it, and then export the results. A general understanding of these ECM features was required for the 70-331 exam.

Planning and Configuring Managed Metadata

One of the most important components of Enterprise Content Management is the ability to apply consistent, well-managed metadata to content. The Managed Metadata Service in SharePoint 2013 provides the tools for this, and it was a critical topic for the 70-331 exam. The Managed Metadata Service allows you to create a central, hierarchical enterprise taxonomy, or a set of "Term Sets." This ensures that the same terminology is used consistently across the entire organization.

The management of this taxonomy is done through the Term Store Management Tool. Here, you can create Term Groups to organize your term sets, and then create the Term Sets themselves. A term set is a collection of related terms. For example, you could create a term set called "Departments" that contains terms for "Human Resources," "Finance," and "Information Technology." This provides a single, centrally managed vocabulary for the organization.

Once the term sets are created, you can create a special type of site column called a "Managed Metadata" column and associate it with a term set. You can then add this column to your content types and lists or libraries. This allows users to tag documents with the centrally managed terms, rather than typing in their own free-form keywords. This leads to much more consistent tagging, which in turn dramatically improves the ability to find and manage content. The 70-331 exam required a solid understanding of this entire process.

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