Salesforce Advanced Administrator Certification Guide

Become a Certified Advanced Salesforce Administrator with this exam guide

Enrico Murru

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781838643898
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781838644765
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Business Intelligence
• Index: Computer Science

Master advanced Salesforce Administration concepts with expert tips, techniques, and mock tests

Key Features

• Learn advanced features to reduce implementation time and enhance your Salesforce administration skills
• Develop the ability to solve critical issues with a proactive approach and deliver the best solution
• Explore complex automation with workflows, approvals, process builder, and custom Apex coding

Book Description

The Salesforce Advanced Administrator certification extends beyond administrator certification, covering advanced platform features and functions such as configuration, automation, security, and customization. Complete with comprehensive coverage of all these topics and exam-oriented questions and mock tests, this Salesforce book will help you earn advanced administrator credentials.

You'll start your journey by mastering data access security, monitoring and auditing, and understanding best practices for handling change management and data across organizations. The book then delves into data model management for improving data quality and lets you explore Sales features such as products, schedules, quotes, and forecasting capabilities. As you progress, this book will guide you in working with content management to set up and maintain Salesforce content. You'll also master organizing your files and data using reports and dashboards. Finally, you'll learn how to use a combination of automation tools to solve business problems.

By the end of the book, you will have developed the skills required to get your advanced administrator credentials.

What you will learn

• Master data security to monitor your org effectively
• Explore best practices for handling change management across orgs
• Extend the capabilities of Salesforce objects using advanced relationships, validation rules, and duplicate management
• Handle file libraries with Salesforce CRM content
• Understand ways to deliver the best solutions with Sales and Service Cloud applications
• Build reports and dashboards to visualize data for better decision making
• Customize your CRM with process automation features

Who this book is for

If you've already achieved your Salesforce administrator certification, this book will help you prepare for the Salesforce Advanced Administrator certification. You'll also find this guide useful if you are a Salesforce administrator or developer and want to maximize your administration skills with deeper knowledge of advanced Salesforce declarative features. 1-2 years of experience as a Salesforce administrator or developer is enough to help you to get the most out of the book.

Section 1: Security, Access, and Organization Management

In this section, you will learn how to efficiently manage your Salesforce organization by mastering data access security and record sharing, and enhancing monitoring and auditing. You will learn about best practices so that you can handle change management and data across different organizations.

This section includes the following chapters:

• Chapter 1, Secure Data Access
• Chapter 2, Auditing and Monitoring
• Chapter 3, Change Management

Secure Data Access

In each Salesforce organization, the administrator is the key holder: they are the guardian of the company's data and thus their main concern is protecting this valuable asset. The right object permissions shape data according to the kind of user who accesses it, while planning the right sharing strategy enables users to see only the subset of records they are authorized to read and/or write, thus delivering coherent and safe business processes.

In this chapter, we will learn about the following topics:

• How data security is handled within the Salesforce platform
• The difference between profiles and permission sets to define what users can do
• Setting up record-level security to restrict/allow access to data depending on the user's shape
• The Salesforce sharing model (from organization-wide default sharing to manual sharing), which determines which objects can be accessed by whom
• Setting up Enterprise Territory Management for a territory-based record-sharing model
• Handling sharing in Salesforce communities to give external users access to data

Controlling who sees what

With tens (or even thousands) of users in your Salesforce organization, choosing the right way to make data visible is an administrator priority: you have to control who sees what and you need to be aware of all the options your Salesforce customer relationship management (CRM) provides.

It's not a coincidence that secure data access is the first subject we are going to study in this book.

In my 10 years' experience, being able to master data access management has always been the key to better data organization, better platform performances, better CRM usability, and of course better customer satisfaction.

Plan the right data sharing and visibility policies at the beginning of your project's journey, along with your data model and business processes. This will prevent your team from strong headaches when the project goes on and no one has ever pictured how users should see data – believe me, doing this important design step at the end of the project is a nightmare.

Data is your number one CRM resource, so use it carefully and with be conscious of it. Let the Salesforce platform take care of it and gently bring your sharing model to life.

Licensing

Like in most applications, every data story begins with a user: they authenticate against the application, they are recognized by their credentials and profile (we're not talking about Salesforce profiles but the generic set of powers a specific kind of user has), and then they are allowed to access the application's features and a subset of the data.

A Salesforce user is identified by their license. The User License field is one of the mandatory fields of the Salesforce user object:

License selection with user creation

The available licenses can be found in Setup | Company Settings | Company Information, in the User Licenses section:

Salesforce Company Information – list of available licenses

The number and type of available licenses you have depends on what your company or your customer has agreed to with Salesforce.

For a complete list of available pricing tiers and products, please refer to https://www.salesforce.com/editions-pricing/overview/.

We can reasonably divide licenses into three groups regarding data sharing:

• Full sharing model usage users/licenses: Users within this category have full access to the Salesforce sharing system. Some objects may not be accessible (for example, the free edition cannot access base CRM objects), but the engine is still there and configurable. This class of users is usually referred to as internal users.
• High volume customer portal licenses: Users within this category do not have access to the sharing model. Instead, sharing is enabled by matching user fields with other object's relations (for example, the contact lookup on the user is used to provide access to cases with the same contact value). This class of users is generally used in Salesforce communities.
• Chatter-free license: This category doesn't have access to the sharing model or any CRM object (standard or custom) and it features collaboration-only access (chatter, groups, and people, to name a few).

For further details on licensing that are out of this scope, have a look at the Trailblazer Community documentation at https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=users_licenses_overview.htm.

In a few words, the license constrains the kind of powers a user has, which is then delivered with profiles and permission sets. We'll take a look at these in the upcoming sections.

The sharing model

One of the first steps when designing a new Salesforce CRM implementation is to set up data access using the sharing model engine. This specifies who can see what!

To understand how this works, have a look at the following diagram:

Salesforce sharing architecture

Profiles determine Object-Level Security (OLS) and Field-Level Security (FLS). They control which objects a user is allowed to access (right or write capabilities) and which fields are visible and editable. You can create a fine-grained view of what's available for a specific object type.

Your implementation may require that the Sales team shouldn't be able to see the account's billing information. Using FLS, you can hide those fields from the sales representative profile. On the other hand, the service team should not be able to access quotes objects: remove any read access to the quote object on the service team profiles.

Permission Sets contains mostly the same attributes as profiles but they are usually added to specific users to pr...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright and Credits
• Dedication
• About Packt
• Contributors
• Preface
• Section 1: Security, Access, and Organization Management
• Secure Data Access
• Auditing and Monitoring
• Change Management
• Section 2: Data Model Management
• Extending Custom Objects
• Section 3: Sales and Service Cloud Applications
• Support Sales Strategies with Sales Cloud Features
• Service Cloud Applications
• Section 4: Data and Content Management
• Improving Data Quality with Duplicate Management
• Salesforce CRM Content Management
• Section 5: Reports and Dashboards
• Mastering Reports
• Visualizing Key Metrics with Dashboards
• Section 6: Process Automation
• Automation with Workflows
• Automating Record Approval with Approval Processes
• Lightning Process Builder
• Lightning Flows
• The Coding Approach
• Section 7: Taking Your Certification Exam
• Tips and Tricks for Passing Your Exam
• Mock Test A and B
• Assessments
• Other Books You May Enjoy