This book covers all the topics of the Salesforce Advanced Administrator certification, comprising 17 chapters contained in 7 sections.
Section 1, Security, Access, and Organization Management, deals with security concerns, monitoring, and change management.
Chapter 1, Secure Data Access, discusses how the administrator is the key holder of a Salesforce organization, the guardian of the company's data. As such, their main concern is protecting this valuable asset. The correct object permissions mean that users can only shape data in accordance with the permissions of that user, while planning the right sharing strategy means users will only see the subset of records that they are authorized to read and/or write, thereby delivering coherent and safe business processes.
Chapter 2, Auditing and Monitoring, is where we will learn how to take control of our organization by monitoring key metrics: user login histories, data usage, setup changes, record field histories, debug logs, and events.
Chapter 3, Change Management, teaches you about the different Salesforce organization types (such as sandboxes, developer organizations, and production organizations). We will also learn how to master change management with change sets and see what other tools can be used to move organization configurations from one organization to another, and we'll learn how to pull and push data using Data Loader.
Section 2, Data Model Management, is all about extending custom objects with relations, advanced formulas, and picklist management.
Chapter 4, Extending Custom Objects, covers the creation of advanced object relationships to support the most complex business cases. You will master validation rules to ensure optimal data quality and consistency, and manage picklist values to increase consistency between objects.
Section 3, Sales and Service Cloud Applications, is about delivering sales cloud and service cloud features to unleash sales strategies and service support for your sales reps and service agents.
Chapter 5, Support Sales Strategies with Sales Cloud Features, explores how to set up and manage products, customize product scheduling settings for the right payment and delivery constraints, and handle price books to organize prices to deliver to customers. Also, we'll delve into using quotes to deliver product pricing propositions to customers, configuring templates to deliver the right information to customers, and using collaborative forecasts to predict sales revenues and quantities from your opportunity pipeline.
Chapter 6, Service Cloud Applications, looks at how to empower service support and use Salesforce Knowledge to create a powerful knowledge base integrated within service processes. Also, we will learn how to use entitlements and milestones to enforce a customer service level agreement. The other topics we'll learn about include delivering efficient service channels with LiveAgent and omnichannel configuration, integrating with your Salesforce console app, and streamlining the way you create, manage, and view cases with case feed configuration.
Section 4, Data and Content Management, covers increasing data quality with duplication rules and managing files with Salesforce CRM Content.
Chapter 7, Improving Data Quality with Duplicate Management, dives into keeping data clean and accurate to ensure quality: defining duplicate policies for real-time local management, and scheduling duplication jobs for organization-wide management. Also, controlling matching rules to customize how Salesforce identifies duplicates and the way that users are notified when a match is found will be discussed.
Chapter 8, Salesforce CRM Content Management, goes into depth on how to use Salesforce CRM Content to organize, share, search, and manage all types of files within our organization. Setting up content, managing the publication of files, organizing files in libraries, searching files, and using content delivery to convert documents into web-optimized versions for online viewing will be the other learning areas of this chapter.
Section 5, Reports and Dashboards, introduces you to report creation and how to visualize complex dashboards.
Chapter 9, Mastering Reports, teaches you about reports, which give us access to our Salesforce data. Using report types to select targeted objects, selecting the required fields to be displayed, setting up filters to narrow down results, scheduling reports, subscribing to reports to receive notifications, reporting key metrics, and organizing reports to speed up searches will be the key things you will master in this chapter.
Chapter 10, Visualizing Key Metrics with Dashboards, is where you will learn how to use dashboards to understand changing business conditions so that you can make decisions based on the real-time data that is gathered by reports. Learning how to build dashboards based upon data from reports, displaying data using different kinds of charts, filtering dashboards, running dashboards with different users, managing dashboards, running schedules, and subscriptions will be the main things that are covered in this chapter.
Section 6, Process Automation, is concerned with implementing Salesforce automation with workflows rules, approval processes, Process Builder, Lightning flows, and custom Apex code.
Chapter 11, Automation with Workflows, takes you through how to deliver point-and-click automation to your business processes by leveraging workflow rules. Creating different kinds of automated actions, such as field updates, email alerts, outbound messages, and task creation will also be explained in this chapter.
Chapter 12, Automating Record Approval with Approval Processes, moves on to specifying all the steps required to approve a record, which includes defining the rules and activating the processes. Advanced examples of these concepts will also be present in the chapter.
Chapter 13, Lightning Process Builder, takes workflow rules to a new level with Process Builder, looking at defining criteria based on objects or platform events to trigger action groups, which consist of immediate or scheduled actions. Troubleshooting a process to understand why errors are arising in order to speed up debugging will also be covered in this chapter.
Chapter 14, Lightning Flows, will cover flows, which actually collect data and perform actions in our Salesforce organization or an external system. We will also learn about using screen flows to collect data from agents or customers (for example, tutorials or wizards) and explore using autolaunched flows, which are flows that are launched after a record is changed or a button is clicked.
Chapter 15, The Coding Approach, shows you that when deeper customization is needed, the coding approach is a win-win situation. Understanding how Apex triggers can deliver complex automation for your processes when the point-and-click approach is not enough, and evaluating Visualforce and Lightning component adoption when user experience constraints necessitate coding magic, are the core learning areas in this chapter.
Section 7, Taking Your Certification Exam, prepares you for exam day and tests your skills with two mock tests.
Chapter 16, Tips and Tricks for Passing Your Exam, teaches you how to really get the most out of this book in terms of passing the exam, preparing you for the Salesforce Advanced Administrator certification, and showing you the best ways to increase your score and get that certification.
Chapter 17, Mock Tests A and B, contains two complete mock certification exams to help you measure your preparation level.