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A Guide to the 70-339 Exam: SharePoint Server 2016 Core Concepts

The Microsoft 70-339 Exam, "Managing Microsoft SharePoint Server 2016," was a key requirement for achieving the MCSE: Productivity Solutions Expert certification. This exam was designed for IT professionals responsible for installing, configuring, managing, and maintaining a SharePoint 2016 environment. Passing this exam certified that an individual had the advanced skills needed to design a SharePoint infrastructure, secure the platform, manage applications, and maintain the farm to ensure optimal performance and availability. It was a benchmark of expertise for seasoned SharePoint administrators.  

Although the 70-339 Exam and its associated certification have been retired by Microsoft, the knowledge and skills it validates remain incredibly relevant. SharePoint Server continues to be a critical platform for collaboration and content management in many organizations. The principles of architecture, security, and administration covered in this exam provide a robust foundation for managing any on-premises SharePoint deployment and offer valuable insights into the workings of its cloud counterpart, SharePoint Online. This series will provide a comprehensive guide to the topics you would need to master for this certification.  

SharePoint 2016 Architecture Overview

A deep understanding of the SharePoint Server 2016 architecture is the absolute foundation for the 70-339 Exam. SharePoint 2016 introduced a new streamlined topology model called MinRole. This feature simplifies farm design by allowing administrators to deploy servers dedicated to specific roles. The primary roles include Front-end, which serves user requests; Application, which runs backend services; Distributed Cache, which provides caching services for performance; and Search, which handles all aspects of the search service. This role-based architecture is designed to optimize performance and reliability.  

In addition to the four basic roles, there are also combined roles for smaller farms, such as Front-end with Distributed Cache. For the 70-339 Exam, you must be able to describe the function of each MinRole, design a farm topology that meets specific business requirements for scale and availability, and understand how SharePoint's Health Analyzer monitors role compliance. This knowledge is crucial for planning a new SharePoint installation or for scaling an existing one.  

The SharePoint Logical Hierarchy

Beyond the physical server roles, the 70-339 Exam requires you to be an expert in SharePoint's logical architecture. This is the hierarchical structure that organizes all the content within the farm. At the very top is the SharePoint Farm itself, which is the complete set of servers and services. Within the farm, you create one or more Web Applications. A web application is essentially an IIS website that acts as a container for all the sites and content that will be exposed to users through a specific URL.

Within each web application, you create Site Collections. A site collection is a set of websites with a single owner and shared administrative settings, such as storage quotas. The top-level site in a site collection is the root site, and you can create multiple subsites beneath it. Finally, the content itself is stored in Lists and Libraries within these sites. Understanding this hierarchy, from the farm down to the individual item, is fundamental to managing permissions, navigation, and content structure.  

The Service Application Framework

SharePoint 2016 uses a powerful service-oriented architecture, and the Service Application Framework is a core concept for the 70-339 Exam. Instead of having all functionality bundled into the core product, SharePoint provides key features through independent, shared services called Service Applications. Each service application has its own database and can be managed separately. Examples of crucial service applications include the Search Service Application, the Managed Metadata Service Application, and the User Profile Service Application.  

This architecture provides significant flexibility. You can choose which services to deploy in your farm, and you can configure them to be consumed by specific web applications. Furthermore, service applications can be published and consumed across different SharePoint farms, which is useful in large enterprise environments. For the exam, you must be able to describe the purpose of the major service applications, know how to provision and configure them, and understand the concept of a service application proxy.  

Planning and Installing a SharePoint Farm

The 70-339 Exam covers the entire lifecycle of a farm, which begins with planning and installation. Before you can install SharePoint, you must ensure all prerequisites are met. This includes provisioning servers with a supported version of Windows Server and having a supported version of Microsoft SQL Server ready to host the farm's databases. You also need to create several dedicated service accounts in Active Directory with the appropriate permissions, as SharePoint uses these accounts to run its application pools and services.

The installation process itself involves several steps. First, you run the SharePoint Products Preparation Tool, which automatically installs all the necessary Windows Server roles and features. After that, you run the main SharePoint setup program to install the product binaries on each server in your farm. The final step is to run the SharePoint Products Configuration Wizard, which creates the core configuration database and connects the server to the farm. Knowing these steps and prerequisites is essential.  

Initial Farm Configuration in Central Administration

After the binaries are installed and the initial farm is created, you perform the bulk of the configuration using the Central Administration website. The 70-339 Exam expects you to be proficient in navigating and using this powerful administrative tool. One of the first tasks is to provision the necessary service applications that your farm will need, such as the Managed Metadata Service and the State Service.  

You will also use Central Administration to configure the farm's general settings, such as outgoing email settings, which allow SharePoint to send alerts and notifications. You will manage the farm's managed accounts, which are the service accounts you created earlier. You will also use this interface to create your first web application, which is the container where your users' content will eventually reside. A solid understanding of the different sections within Central Administration is non-negotiable for the 70-339 Exam.

Key Objectives of the 70-339 Exam

To structure your studies effectively for the 70-339 Exam, it is crucial to understand the main objectives or skill areas that are measured. The exam is broken down into several major sections. The first is "Design SharePoint Infrastructure," which covers topics like farm topology, logical architecture, and planning for high availability and disaster recovery. This is a foundational area focused on planning and design.  

The second major area is "Plan Authentication and Security," which deals with configuring user authentication, managing permissions, and securing the farm at all levels. The third section, "Manage SharePoint Solutions, BI, and Systems Integration," covers the deployment of custom solutions, as well as the configuration of Business Connectivity Services and other integration features. Finally, other sections cover the ongoing "Administration and Maintenance" of the farm, including monitoring, tuning, and content management.  

Deep Dive into MinRole Farm Topologies

A key innovation in SharePoint 2016, and a major topic for the 70-339 Exam, is the MinRole feature. This feature simplifies the deployment and management of farm topologies by aligning servers with specific, predefined roles. You must have a detailed understanding of the services that run on each of the four basic roles: Front-end, Application, Distributed Cache, and Search. For example, the Front-end role is optimized for low-latency user traffic, while the Search role handles the complex components of the search service.  

For high availability, the 70-339 Exam requires you to know how to design a fault-tolerant farm. This involves deploying at least two servers for each MinRole to create redundancy. You would have two or more Front-end servers behind a load balancer, two Application servers, two Search servers, and a cluster of at least three Distributed Cache servers. Understanding how to combine these roles to build a small, medium, or large farm that meets specific performance and availability requirements is a core design skill.

Designing the Logical Architecture

Beyond the physical servers, the 70-339 Exam tests your ability to design the farm's logical architecture. This process begins with planning your Web Applications. A key decision is whether to use path-based or host-named site collections. Host-named site collections, where each site collection has a unique DNS name, is the recommended approach and offers better scalability. You must also plan your managed paths, which are used to structure the URL namespace within a web application.  

The next step is to design the structure of your site collections and sites. This involves working with business stakeholders to understand their collaboration and content management needs and then translating those needs into a logical site hierarchy. This plan should consider things like navigation, security boundaries, and content ownership. A well-designed logical architecture is crucial for user adoption and long-term manageability of the SharePoint environment.

Configuring the User Profile Service Application

The User Profile Service Application (UPA) is one of the most important and complex service applications, and it is a guaranteed topic on the 70-339 Exam. The UPA is responsible for aggregating user profile information from various sources, most commonly Active Directory. It is the foundation for many of SharePoint's social and personalization features, such as My Sites and organizational charts. You must know the steps to provision the UPA and its associated databases.  

The most critical task is configuring the User Profile Synchronization. This involves creating a synchronization connection to an Active Directory domain. You must specify the domain controller, the authentication credentials, and the containers (Organizational Units) that you want to synchronize. You also need to map the attributes, telling the UPA which Active Directory property corresponds to which profile property (e.g., mapping the AD "telephoneNumber" attribute to the "Work phone" property in SharePoint).

Managing Web Application Settings

The 70-339 Exam will expect you to be an expert in managing Web Applications through Central Administration. This includes not only creating new web applications but also managing their ongoing settings. You need to know how to configure the general settings, such as setting the default time zone and defining the maximum file upload size. You must also be familiar with the resource throttling settings, which are used to protect the farm from performance degradation caused by poorly designed queries or large list views.

A key management task is extending a web application to a different IIS web site, which is how you create different access zones, such as an extranet zone. This allows you to apply different authentication policies and URLs for different groups of users accessing the same content. Understanding how to manage application pools, configure alternate access mappings, and control the solution and feature deployments for a web application are all core administrative skills tested on the 70-339 Exam.  

Planning for High Availability and Disaster Recovery

Ensuring the continuous operation of the SharePoint farm is a primary responsibility for an administrator. The 70-339 Exam requires you to understand the strategies for both High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR). High Availability is about providing redundancy within a single data center to protect against individual server or component failures. For SharePoint, this involves having multiple servers in each MinRole and using a hardware or software load balancer for the Front-end servers.  

For the database tier, the recommended HA solution is SQL Server Always On availability groups, which provide automatic failover for the SharePoint databases. Disaster Recovery, on the other hand, is about recovering the service in a separate, geographically distant data center in case of a site-wide outage. Common DR strategies include database log shipping or building a secondary "standby" farm to which you can fail over. For the exam, you must be able to differentiate between HA and DR and describe the key technologies used for each.  

Configuring the Managed Metadata Service

The Managed Metadata Service Application is the foundation for taxonomy and enterprise content management in SharePoint. The 70-339 Exam requires you to know how to configure and manage this service. The primary purpose of this service is to provide a central repository for creating and managing a formal, hierarchical set of business terms, known as a Term Store. These terms can then be used consistently across the entire farm for tagging documents and other content.

As an administrator, you must know how to provision the Managed Metadata service application and its database. You will then use the Term Store Management Tool to create term groups and term sets. This is also the service that manages enterprise-wide Content Types. You can create content type "hubs" that publish a consistent set of content types to all site collections in the farm. This service is crucial for creating a well-organized and navigable information architecture.  

Planning and Configuring Authentication

Security is a massive domain, and the 70-339 Exam places a strong emphasis on authentication. You must have a deep understanding of SharePoint 2016's claims-based authentication architecture. The default and most common authentication method is Windows Claims. You need to know how this works, with SharePoint trusting claims (pieces of information about a user, like their identity and group memberships) that are provided by Active Directory Domain Services.

In addition to Windows Claims, the 70-339 Exam requires you to understand SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language) based claims. This method is used to integrate SharePoint with a trusted third-party identity provider, such as Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) or another SAML-compliant provider. This enables single sign-on scenarios where users can log in using credentials from a different organization. You should be able to describe the high-level configuration steps for setting up a trusted identity provider in SharePoint.

Managing Authorization and Permissions

Once a user is authenticated, SharePoint needs to determine what they are authorized to do. The 70-339 Exam will test you thoroughly on your ability to manage SharePoint's permissions model. The core of this model is based on three components: users, SharePoint groups, and permission levels. A permission level is a named collection of specific rights, such as "Read," "Contribute," or "Full Control." A SharePoint group is a collection of users.  

The best practice, which you must know for the exam, is to always assign permission levels to SharePoint groups, and then add your users to those groups. You should avoid assigning permissions directly to individual users whenever possible, as this becomes very difficult to manage over time. You must also understand the concept of permission inheritance, where a subsite or a library automatically inherits the permissions of its parent container, and know how to break this inheritance to set unique permissions.  

Securing the SharePoint Farm Infrastructure

Beyond user permissions, the 70-339 Exam covers the broader topic of securing the farm itself. This involves a layered approach. At the highest level, you must tightly control who is a member of the SharePoint Farm Administrators group, as these users have full control over the entire environment. You should also be familiar with the concept of the object cache super user and super reader accounts, which are necessary for caching features to work correctly.  

You will also use Central Administration to configure farm-wide security settings. This includes managing blocked file types, which allows you to prevent users from uploading files with specific extensions (like .exe) that could pose a security risk. You will also need to know how to configure the integration with an antivirus engine using the standard SharePoint interfaces, which enables the scanning of all files as they are uploaded to the farm.  

Implementing Information Rights Management (IRM)

For protecting highly sensitive documents, the 70-339 Exam requires you to understand how to implement Information Rights Management (IRM). IRM allows you to apply persistent protection to documents downloaded from SharePoint. When a user downloads an IRM-protected file, the policy is enforced by the client application (like Microsoft Word or Adobe Reader). The policy can prevent actions such as printing, copying text, or forwarding the document. This protection travels with the file, even when it leaves the SharePoint environment.  

To enable this feature, SharePoint must be integrated with a rights management server, typically Microsoft Active Directory Rights Management Services (AD RMS). For the exam, you should understand the high-level architecture of this integration and know the steps to enable and configure IRM on a specific SharePoint document library. You will need to be able to create and apply IRM policies that define the specific restrictions to be enforced.

Using Site Policies for Information Governance

Information governance is a key theme in the 70-339 Exam. SharePoint 2016 provides several tools to help organizations manage the lifecycle of their sites and information. One of the primary tools for this is Site Policies. A Site Policy is a set of rules that defines the lifecycle of a site collection. For example, you can create a policy that automatically deletes a site collection a certain number of years after it was created, which is useful for managing temporary project sites.  

The policy can also be configured to make a site read-only before it is deleted, or to trigger a workflow to get approval for the deletion. As an administrator, you are responsible for creating these policies in the Site Collection Policies gallery and then making them available for site collection owners to apply to their sites. This feature is crucial for preventing site sprawl and for enforcing corporate retention and disposition schedules.  

Configuring and Using Audit Logs

To meet compliance requirements and to investigate security incidents, you must be able to track who is accessing content within your SharePoint farm. The 70-339 Exam will expect you to know how to configure and use SharePoint's auditing capabilities. Auditing can be enabled at the site collection level. The site collection administrator can choose which specific events they want to record in the audit log.

Events that can be audited include viewing content, editing items, checking items in or out, and changing permissions. Once auditing is enabled and events have been collected, you can generate audit log reports. These reports can show you, for example, a complete history of all the users who have viewed a particular sensitive document. For the 70-339 Exam, you must know how to enable auditing and how to access and interpret these critical reports.  

Managing SharePoint Solutions and Add-ins

The 70-339 Exam covers your ability to manage customizations and extensions to the SharePoint platform. In SharePoint 2016, there are two primary models for this: Farm Solutions and the Add-in Model (also known as the App Model). Farm Solutions are the traditional way of deploying custom code. They are powerful but run directly on the SharePoint servers, which means a poorly written farm solution can impact the stability and performance of the entire farm.  

Because of this risk, the preferred model, which you must understand for the 70-339 Exam, is the Add-in Model. SharePoint Add-ins run in a separate, isolated process, either on a different server (provider-hosted) or within the client's browser. This isolation prevents them from crashing the SharePoint servers. As an administrator, you are responsible for managing the farm's App Catalog, which is a special site collection where you upload and manage the add-in packages that are available for users to install in their sites.  

Business Connectivity Services (BCS) Deep Dive

A key integration feature tested on the 70-339 Exam is Business Connectivity Services (BCS). BCS is the framework that allows you to connect SharePoint to external data sources and surface that data within the SharePoint interface as if it were native SharePoint content. This allows you to create solutions that integrate with line-of-business systems, such as a CRM or an external SQL database, without having to migrate the data.  

The core component of BCS is the External Content Type (ECT). An ECT is a reusable definition that describes how to connect to the external system and what operations (like read, create, update, delete) are available. You must know how to use tools like SharePoint Designer to create ECTs. Once an ECT is created, you can then create an External List in a SharePoint site, which looks and feels like a regular SharePoint list but gets its data directly from the external system in real time.  

The SharePoint 2016 Search Architecture

Search is one of the most critical and complex service applications in SharePoint, and it is a major topic for the 70-339 Exam. You must have a solid understanding of the search architecture and its various components. The search process involves several stages, each handled by a specific type of component. Crawl components are responsible for fetching content from your defined content sources. Content Processing components then extract and normalize this content, creating a stream of text and metadata.  

The Analytics Processing components analyze this content and user interactions to improve search relevance. The Index components take the processed content and build the search index. Finally, the Query Processing components receive user queries, find matching results in the index, and apply security trimming to ensure users only see results they have permission to access. For the exam, you must be able to describe the role of each of these components in a search topology.  

Configuring and Managing Search Crawls

The most fundamental administrative task for search is telling it what content to include in the index. The 70-339 Exam will test your ability to manage this process. This is done by creating and configuring Content Sources. A content source defines a starting address and a set of rules for the crawler. For example, you would create a content source for your local SharePoint sites, another for a network file share, and potentially another for a public website.

For each content source, you must configure a Crawl Schedule. This tells the search service how often to check for new or updated content. You can schedule full crawls, which process all content, and more frequent incremental crawls, which only process content that has changed since the last crawl. As an administrator, you are also responsible for monitoring the crawl logs to identify and troubleshoot any errors that occur during the crawling process.  

Optimizing the End-User Search Experience

Beyond just getting content into the index, the 70-339 Exam requires you to know how to optimize the search experience for your users. SharePoint provides several powerful tools for this. One of the most important is Query Rules. A query rule allows you to create a condition (e.g., if a query contains the word "report") and then trigger an action. The action could be to promote a specific result to the top of the search results page or to display a block of best bets.

Another key tool is the Search Schema. The search schema controls how content is processed and how it can be used in queries. You need to understand the difference between crawled properties (the raw metadata discovered during a crawl) and managed properties (which are used in queries and refiners). A common task is to map a crawled property, like "Project Code" from a document, to a new managed property so that users can search for and refine their results based on that specific piece of metadata.  

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Features

The 70-339 Exam places a strong emphasis on the features that support Enterprise Content Management (ECM). A cornerstone of ECM in SharePoint is the Managed Metadata Service, which allows you to create and manage a formal taxonomy, or Term Store. You must understand how this structured set of terms can be used to ensure consistent tagging of content across the enterprise, which dramatically improves the findability and organization of information. This service is also used to create and manage enterprise-wide Content Types.  

A Content Type is a reusable set of settings for a category of content, such as a "Contract" or a "Project Proposal." It defines the metadata columns, the document template, and the workflows associated with that type of content. The 70-339 Exam will expect you to know how to create and publish content types from a central hub to ensure that all sites in the farm use a consistent definition for key business documents.  

Introduction to Enterprise Content Management

Enterprise Content Management represents a comprehensive approach to organizing, storing, and managing digital assets throughout their lifecycle within SharePoint environments. For candidates preparing for the 70-339 Exam, understanding ECM principles provides the foundation for mastering document and records management capabilities. ECM encompasses document management, records management, web content management, and digital asset management within unified SharePoint infrastructures.

SharePoint's ECM capabilities enable organizations to implement governance policies, compliance requirements, and operational efficiency improvements through systematic content management approaches. The platform provides tools for content creation, collaboration, retention management, and disposal processes that support regulatory compliance and business continuity requirements.

The 70-339 Exam emphasizes practical implementation of ECM features rather than theoretical concepts alone. Candidates must demonstrate proficiency in configuring document libraries, implementing retention policies, managing content types, and utilizing specialized features like Document ID Service and Content Organizer functionality.

Document Management Core Concepts

Document management within SharePoint involves systematic approaches to content creation, storage, retrieval, and collaboration throughout document lifecycles. Effective document management requires understanding metadata schemas, content types, document libraries, and workflow processes that support organizational requirements and user productivity needs.

Metadata serves as the foundation for effective document management, providing structured information that enables classification, search, and automated processing capabilities. Content types define metadata schemas, document templates, and workflow associations that ensure consistent document handling across site collections and organizational boundaries.

Version control mechanisms protect document integrity while enabling collaborative editing and approval processes. SharePoint's versioning capabilities track changes, maintain historical versions, and support concurrent editing scenarios that prevent data loss and enable rollback capabilities when necessary.

Records Management Principles and Requirements

Records management differs from general document management through emphasis on long-term preservation, regulatory compliance, and legal defensibility requirements. Official records require specialized handling that includes retention scheduling, audit trails, and immutability controls that prevent unauthorized modifications or deletions.

Regulatory compliance drives many records management requirements, necessitating understanding of various legal frameworks, industry standards, and organizational policies that govern record keeping practices. The 70-339 Exam tests knowledge of implementing compliant records management solutions using SharePoint's specialized features and capabilities.

Records lifecycle management encompasses creation, active use, inactive storage, and eventual disposal phases that require different handling approaches and technical capabilities. Understanding these lifecycle phases helps candidates design appropriate SharePoint configurations that support long-term records management requirements.

Web Content Management (WCM) Capabilities

SharePoint 2016 is also a powerful platform for Web Content Management (WCM), used for building everything from team intranets to public-facing websites. The 70-339 Exam requires you to be familiar with the core WCM features. This includes the branding components, such as Master Pages, which define the overall look and feel of a site, and Page Layouts, which define the structure for specific types of pages, like an article page or a welcome page.  

A key feature for modern intranets is Managed Navigation. This allows you to build the site's navigation structure directly from a term set in the Managed Metadata Term Store, making it much easier to manage than traditional, manually built navigation. You should also understand the concept of Cross-Site Publishing, which allows you to maintain your content in one or more authoring site collections and then publish it for display in one or more rendering site collections.

Monitoring and Maintaining Farm Health

The ongoing health and maintenance of the SharePoint farm is a critical responsibility, and it is a major topic for the 70-339 Exam. Your primary tool for proactive monitoring is the SharePoint Health Analyzer. This tool runs a series of predefined health rules against your farm and reports on any configuration issues, performance problems, or security vulnerabilities it finds. You must know how to review the Health Analyzer reports and take the recommended actions to resolve any issues.

For reactive troubleshooting, your most important tool is the Unified Logging Service (ULS) logs. These are detailed diagnostic logs written by SharePoint. You must know where to find these logs and how to use tools like the ULS Viewer to filter and analyze them to find the root cause of an error. The exam will also expect you to be familiar with managing SharePoint's timer jobs, which are the background processes that perform most of the system's maintenance tasks.  

Final Review of Key 70-339 Exam Topics

As you prepare to take the 70-339 Exam, a final review of the most critical topics is essential. First, be absolutely certain you can explain the MinRole architecture and the purpose of each server role. Second, review the Service Application Framework and be able to name and describe the function of the top five service applications (Search, User Profiles, Managed Metadata, BCS, Secure Store). Third, solidify your understanding of claims-based authentication, especially the difference between Windows Claims and SAML Claims.

Fourth, be able to draw the SharePoint permission hierarchy and explain the best practice of using groups. Fifth, review the search architecture and the process of optimizing the search experience with query rules and managed properties. Finally, make sure you understand the difference between farm solutions and the add-in model. Focusing on these high-value topics will give you the best chance of success on the 70-339 Exam.

Conclusion

The 70-339 Exam was known for being a challenging test of practical, real-world skills. Many questions were presented in a case study format, where you were given a description of a company's environment and business requirements and then asked a series of questions based on that scenario. To succeed, you must read these case studies very carefully and be able to apply your knowledge to design a solution that meets all the stated requirements.  

Time management is critical. Do not spend too much time on any one question. If you are unsure, make an educated guess and move on. The best preparation for this type of exam is hands-on experience. Building a lab environment and actually performing the tasks, such as configuring a service application or setting up a new web application, is far more effective than just reading. With thorough preparation and a solid lab practice, you can master the skills needed for the 70-339 Exam.

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