What this book covers
Chapter 1, Demystifying Salesforce, Customer 360, and Digital 360, explains the core terminology used in the Salesforce space, including the difference between products, clouds, and platforms, as the first step in your journey. From there, we'll provide a foundational understanding of the Salesforce Platform on which so much of the solution is built.
Chapter2, Supporting Your Customers with Service Cloud, covers Service Cloud's core functionality and goes deeper into the integration options and data model supported by the underlying Salesforce Platform.
Chapter 3, Direct-to-Consumer Selling with Commerce Cloud B2C, covers the strengths and limitations, core data model, and integration capabilities of B2C Commerce, which is the enterprise commerce engine used to power thousands of websites through the busiest shopping days of the year.
Chapter 4, Engaging Customers with Marketing Cloud, sets out how Marketing Cloud's core messaging and journeys platform supports marketing and transactional communications across a variety of channels, as well as marketing journey creation and more. We cover its capabilities, component products, data model, and integration options.
Chapter 5, Salesforce Ecosystem – Building a Complete Solution, focuses on a high-level review of additional Salesforce products, beyond the three pillars of the B2C solution architecture (B2C Commerce, Service Cloud, and Marketing Cloud), and where these products will have advantages in your solution.
Chapter 6, Role of a Solution Architect, teaches you how to assemble an appropriate team, how to structure a discovery, organize a project, and what the essential deliverables are for the B2C Solution Architect exam.
Chapter 7, Integration Architecture Options, goes into more detail about both point-to-point and middleware-based integration options. We'll also review cross-cloud development life cycles to help structure a team that can deliver on more than one workstream.
Chapter 8, Creating a 360° View of the Customer, explains how the heart of a successful B2C solution architecture is a complete and consistent picture of the customer. This means tying together commerce, marketing, service, and other experiences. We'll cover what a customer means in each system and how they all relate to one another.
Chapter 9, Supporting Key Business Scenarios, explores the Salesforce-provided solution kits that serve as a jumping-off point and then customizes and extends them for our fictional organization.
Chapter 10, Enterprise Integration Strategies, tackles topics such as multiple Salesforce orgs, B2C Commerce realms, and Marketing Cloud business units as we explore integration with other enterprise systems.
Chapter 11, Exam Preparation Tools and Techniques, serves as a quick reference for essential topics, study materials, and recommendations for how to get hands-on experience in these areas for those interested in the Salesforce B2C Solution Architect certification.
Chapter 12, Prerequisite Certifications, details how, before qualifying for the B2C Solution Architect exam, you'll need to achieve the three prerequisite certifications covered in this chapter. We'll provide a review of the topics, with an emphasis on the recommended order and which sections of this book to review for a refresher.
Chapter 13, Commerce and Integration, covers some essential topics and provides study recommendations for those interested in B2C Commerce technical architecture given that, although the Salesforce B2C Commerce Architect certification is not a prerequisite for the B2C Solution Architect certification, there are a lot of topics that will transfer across.
Chapter 14, Certification Scenarios, concludes by bringing everything together with four realistic example scenarios using our fictional Packt Enterprises company. For each scenario, we'll review possible options, shape a solution, and provide a recommended approach to help establish good habits that will transfer to the exam or real life.