MS-102 deep review — September 28, 2026

The complete guide was read and all 54 objectives in 12 groups individually mapped. The accepted April 28 snapshot is unchanged. November 30 remains the announced exam/credential retirement; the credential lists four qualifying associate certifications. The official course-retirement table names AB-650T00 as replacement training, which does not establish a direct replacement expert credential.

Learning changes

Five worked examples cover operation-specific recovery points and elapsed recovery time, licensing membership versus successful assignment, Conditional Access grant composition, email protection precedence and DLP precision/recall. Two new labs bring the total to ten. All 36 existing questions now have an answer key, with eight additional answered checks, for 44 answers. Ten offline arithmetic/decision/catalog checks passed, and one PowerShell inventory block was syntax-parsed. No tenant, Graph call, directory migration, sync upgrade, restore, paid service, DLP deployment or preview feature was run.

Operational additions distinguish September 30 Connect Sync enforcement from the separate Connect Health agent requirements and normal version support. They cover app/certificate ownership and scheduler-dependent rotation, destination-first licensing migration, November 3 memberOf retirement, legacy app-grant read-only behavior, Cloud Apps enforcement prerequisites, Data Explorer permissions and Teams chat/file/tenant boundaries.

Backup treatment separates preview Full Workload Backup from custom policies, including paused-policy precedence, daily discovery, static versus dynamic membership, exclusions and removal. Retention reductions and moves to shorter windows have a 30-day deletion grace period. The original-location granular restore feature is documented now; older overview and April blog roadmap wording is qualified by specific current instructions. Published restore performance medians are not a tenant recovery-time commitment.

The passkey transition now explicitly identifies Global Administrators and external users in the July 2027 exception, while internal guests stay in the February cohort. A shared follow-up covers related guides. The retrieved general Entra release feed stopped at June; specific product pages and the September Microsoft blog supplied more recent evidence. Relevant current Defender/Purview entries were checked without treating every preview as a new exam objective. Six dated follow-ups cover these dependencies and retirement.

Open documentation gap

Backup policy configuration supports a two-year recovery window, but the restore-frequency table documents only days 0–365. The guide does not extend that schedule into the second year. This review is reviewed with blockers, with an October 1 checkpoint for authoritative clarification. The original September 1 passed source review is retained unchanged as historical evidence; it does not resolve this newly recorded gap.

Resource and blog decisions

Nine Learn paths currently list 39 modules. Their earlier 28h45 runtime is historical and was not exposed by this retrieval. Direct course metadata still lists five days despite the credential page's empty training collection. Pluralsight's five public listings total 7h44 and date from June–December 2025; they do not prove April 2026 coverage. MeasureUp lists 123 questions and a November 2025 update; its exam-alone credential claim is qualified by Microsoft's associate prerequisite. Paid lessons and questions were not reviewed.

O'Reilly book/video and Udemy blocked retrieval, so their older metadata is clearly historical. Video-channel and partner shells do not establish underlying content, eligibility or schedules. The practice-assessment entry point did not expose question content for review.

• Microsoft 365 Backup granular restore now generally available, Microsoft author diksha050, April 29: main article read; accepted a file-versus-site recovery exercise, with current in-place behavior and operation-specific recovery-point limits supplied by product documentation.
• What's new in Microsoft Entra: September 2026, Yina Arenas, September 1: main article read; accepted a memberOf dependency and migration exercise corroborated by the official migration page. Adjacent previews are not assumed to be available in every tenant or added to the exam.

Linked demonstrations were not executed. Research, repair and local checks used the same AI context; independent and human review remain pending. The evidence ledger is ADLC_Docs/operations/2026-09-28-ms-102-deep-review.json, containing prior records, objective mappings, source observations, hashes, findings and local validation results.