USB Drivers

SIMCom has provided some Windows drivers for the SIM7000 modules and here are the steps you can take to get it working on your computer!

Plug the shield into your Arduino and power up the Arduino (either via USB cable or battery)
Also attach a micro USB cable to the shield's micro USB port to connect it to your computer
Believe it or not, the module has to be on in order for you to communicate with it! To turn it on you will have to pulse the PWRKEY pin to GND for a little bit. In order to do this you can either run the LTE_Demo sketch on your Arduino board, run a simple sketch that pulses the PWRKEY pin low for 100ms, or, in the case that you don't even have a microcontroller connected to the shield, use a male-to-male Dupont jumper wire and manually connect the PWRKEY pin to GND for about half a second. You should see the green power LED on the shield turn on shortly thereafter!
Find the SIM7000 drivers here on Github and use a tool like 7zip to extract the files to a convenient location on your computer (i.e., Desktop). You should see a single folder like "Windows8 Drivers" in that location. Note: The Windows 8 version works just fine on Windows 10!
Now, with your shield plugged in, open up the Device Manager (in Windows 8-10 you can search "device manager" in the Start menu) and look under the "Ports" section. You should only see your Arduino COM port (and any other device you may have plugged in), but no SIM7000! If you look under "Other devices" you will see "SimTech SIM7000" devices listed but it has a yellow warning symbol next to it.

All you need to do is right click on "SimTech SIM7000", click "Update Driver" then click "Browse my computer for driver software" and select the "Windows8 Drivers" folder, wherever you placed it. After cranking through some stuff, it should say that it successfully installed the drivers!

Now if you look under the "Ports" section in Device Manager you should see several different COM ports appear. If you don't see all the ports appear, try unplugging and plugging the USB back in. Also, if you see any other orange warning symbols appearing under the "Other devices" section just right click and update each one of them, manually selecting the same folder as before. It will then install different drivers.

Finally, here's what mine showed after all was said and done:

To send AT commands to the module directly you can use a terminal program like PuTTY to connect to the AT COM port (in my case, COM9) at any baud rate (although try to use standard ones like 9600 or 115200). You should then be able to send AT commands to it! To test if it responds simply type "AT" and press Enter and see if it replies with "OK". If it does, you're good to go!