Phil's Salesforce Tip of the Week

TrailheaDX 2021 – Phil’s Salesforce Tip of the Week #457

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Welcome to my Salesforce Tip of the Week #457

 

Tip 1 – TrailheaDX 2021

I only manage to catch a few snippets of Live TrailheaDX 2021 this week, so I’m still trying to catch up. But the highlights seem to be these (if you don’t know what they are, click and read up, and nobody will notice you watched the footy instead!):

1.  Diagrams

At TrailheaDX 2021 there was an announcement of a new partnership between Salesforce and Lucidchart. With this partnership, it will combine the power of the new Salesforce diagramming framework with Lucidchart shape libraries.

2. Salesforce Functions

New to the Salesforce Platform, Salesforce Functions let’s you deliver more scalable experiences.

3. AWS Partnership

“This is a milestone partnership for the technology industry, and one that will enable our customers to experience an even more powerful Salesforce Customer 360 and achieve a new level of success in their business”

Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO, Salesforce

“With this partnership, we are significantly simplifying developers’ lives and empowering them to develop applications however they want, from wherever they want globally, at any scale.”

Andy Jassy, CEO, Amazon Web Services

4. Dynamic Interactions

Dynamic Interactions is the latest low-code innovation for the Salesforce Platform. It’s part of Salesforce’s continuing aim to make Lightning pages more dynamic and interactive.

5. B2B Architect Cert

See below…

 

Tip 2 – New Certification

Also announced at TrailheaDX 2021, the B2B Architect Certification follows on from the B2C cert from last year. Building on top of your knowledge (and certs) on individual clouds, these certs focus on multi-cloud understanding and ability. Click here for the exam guide, and here for the best Trailhead study materials.

 

Tip 3 – UKI CEO

Zahra Bahrololoumi joined Salesforce as UK&I CEO in March, and before we hear her first big keynote at Salesforce Live on 7th July (click here to register), here is a great interview to introduce us.

 

FINAL TIP OF THE WEEK – SIGN UP

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Phil's Salesforce Tip of the Week

UX Cert and 9to5 – Phil’s Salesforce Tip of the Week #438

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UX Cert

Keep an eye on the @SalesforceUX Twitter feed for updates on a proposed new Certification in User Experience design. There is a great opportunity to register your interest with the team to get involved with the exam design and content!

“The Trailhead Credentialing team is creating a new certification specifically for those designing great user experiences – we are looking for subject matter experts that can help us define, develop, and set the standards for this exam.”

 

 

What a way to make a living!

This week Salesforce seems to have declared the “9-to-5 workday is dead”! Before we celebrate too hard, I don’t think it is recommending a 9 to 4.30 day. But that Salesforce employees will not be expected to be in their ‘old’ offices as much in the future, and ‘Employees who do not live near an office are free to work remotely indefinitely.’ Take a read of the full article here. And take a minute to think what your working life will be like in 2022.

Quote from the Guardian Newspaper: ““As employers, we have an opportunity to create an even better workplace – one that allows us to be more connected to each other, find more balance between work and home, and advance equality – ultimately leading to increased innovation and better business outcomes,” said Brent Hyder, the chief “people officer” at Salesforce, who heads its employee policies.”
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Salesforce Data Architecture and Management Designer Certification Tips

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As we move into 2021, the focus on professional development at Cloud Galacticos continues to gain momentum. We like to encourage our team to keep on developing and learning new skills. Our new Salesforce Certification Help page is continually being added to, and one of the latest exams to be included is the Data Architecture and Management Designer Certification. We caught up with our Senior Consultant, Val, who recently passed this exam:

 

Salesforce Application Architect Certification

 

What made you decide to take the Data Architecture and Management Designer Certification?

As a fan of Trailhead, I’m a big believer in constantly challenging myself to keep up with the ever-changing landscape of Salesforce. I have enjoyed completing some superbadges to cement knowledge gained from working with Salesforce.

In January 2020, I decided to embark on a journey to become a Certified Application Architect and subsequently passed both Certified Salesforce Platform Developer I and Certified Sharing and Visibility Designer towards that. I needed a total of three more certifications and this one was the last requirement.

 

How did you approach the prep for this exam?

I conducted some research into other people who had taken and passed the exam. And as a member of the Ladies Be Architects group, I found some great posts and links there, which helped focus on study areas.

The consensus seemed to be that the first approach is to review the exam guide. Then to conduct a self-diagnosis of the areas I knew well, those I knew fairly well (and may need to refresh) and finally, those which I was aware of but had never touched before. From there I focussed on the items in my list which needed the most attention. 

I’d heard from colleagues and Trailblazer communities that FocusOnForce was a good resource for practice questions and exams. Although not a free resource, it was worth the small fee for trying out the type of scenario-based questions that I was likely to face. As I completed each subsection test one by one, it let me know which areas needed more work.

Then I embarked on a mission of completing Trailhead badges, trails and projects to gain some understanding & experience in completing some of the tasks involved in designing the type of solutions required of a Data Architecture and Management Designer. Not everything is covered in Trailhead, so I combined this with reading up from help.salesforce.com. I also created online flashcards for the areas I would need to revise later.

 

Was it difficult and any tips for people thinking of doing this exam?

As with the Salesforce Sharing and Visibility exam, it was harder than expected. When I hit ‘Submit Exam’, I honestly had no idea whether the result was going to be pass or fail! 

Although FocusOnForce had prepared me to an extent, these questions were very different. On some questions, it was answering on instinct more than anything else. In the end, I think what really helped was having lots of real-world experience designing and building applications. Also fixing badly designed ones! 

There were more questions than expected about query efficiency and, surprisingly, none about Customer360. Mine was the Winter 21 version of the exam, so undoubtedly, Customer 360 will be included in later versions.

 

Salesforce Data Architecture and Management Design Certification

 

What does becoming a certified Salesforce Application Architect mean to you in terms of your daily work at Cloud Galacticos?

As a Senior Consultant at Cloud Galacticos, my role includes designing and implementing solutions on the Salesforce platform, so it is important to make sure the knowledge that goes into providing our customers with advice and solutions is correct and up to date. That includes studying areas of functionality that I haven’t personally touched on but which could come up as important in my next project.

 

About Cloud Galacticos

Cloud Galacticos is a Salesforce Consulting Partner with an all-star team. We are user and developer group leaders, bloggers, MVPs and all round Salesforce nerds. We have people all over the UK including Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle, Sheffield, and London. If you are looking for a Salesforce partner with experience who can help you make the most of your org, why not give us a call?

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Postman and World Tour – Phil’s Salesforce Tip of the Week #437

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Postman

Last year Salesforce announced that they had released a Postman collection to allow developers to work with the Salesforce APIs and get up and running quickly building integrations. For those who haven’t used Postman, it is a fantastic tool to allow you to call and work with APIs and verify that you have the correct request parameters and inspect the responses. It is one of the favourite tools of the techies at Cloud Galacticos.

 

The Salesforce developer evangelist team have announced a raft of additional updates to the collection including it now being listed on the API network making it easier to find, and enabling developers to contribute to the collection to enhance it and share those enhancements with the community. If you are looking to work with the Salesforce APIs I highly recommend that you check this resource out to give you a head start.

World Tour 2021

Please don’t say it is ‘re-imagined’… This year’s World Tour will happen in 1 day (10th Feb), with “an original series broadcast live from surprise locations around the world”. Register here, to see if a surprise location includes some fake bushes in San Francisco!

Personally the World Tour in London has been my annual highlight, but an in-person event which of course won’t happen for a while. Nothing beats the chance to meet up with friends, Clients, colleagues, community members, and new people that you have Salesforce in common with. But this will suffice for 2021, we will all make the most of it!

Welcome!

This week Salesforce announced that David Schmaier has been named President and Chief Product Officer. David joined Salesforce through the acquisition of Vlocity, where he was the co-founder. Read a welcome post and interview here.

Congratulations!

Congratulations to our latest Galactico to join become a Certified Architect!! Great work Val Southern! I am sure there will be a blog post following soon…but this week Val passed her Data Architect and Management Designer cert, which was the last one needed in order to gain the Application Architect certification. Very impressive!

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Salesforce Einstein Analytics and Discovery Consultant Certification Tips

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Over the past few years I have worked numerous times with Salesforce Einstein Analytics (now Tableau CRM) and always wanted to get pass the Salesforce Einstein Analytics and Discovery Consultant Certification but never had the time. I found myself with a a couple of days free before the Christmas holidays with nowhere to go, so I set about getting myself certified. As a slight spoiler, I passed, here are a few things I found helped me to achieve the certification. Note I will use the old name “Einstein” throughout this post to match the exam.

Don’t forget to check out the Cloud Galacticos Salesforce Certification Help page for info on other certs!

 

Before We Start – What Even is Einstein?

 

Einstein

Firstly, I want to just clearly define what is being discussed here. In this blog I am referring to Salesforce Einstein Analytics (now known as Tableau CRM) and the related Discovery tools. Einstein is a fairly catch all term with Salesforce now and so it can be confusing. This exam and certification focusses on these products specifically and not any of the following:

  • Next Best Action
  • Bots
  • Language
  • Vision
  • Prediction Builder

 

Salesforce Einstein Analytics and Discovery Consultant Exam Format

There are 60 multiple choice questions that are scored with 5 non-scored questions, with 90 minutes to complete. The passing score is 68% or 41 marks. The key areas covered in the exam are:

  • Data Layer – 24%
  • Security – 11%
  • Admin – 9%
  • Analytics Dashboard Design – 19%
  • Analytics Dashboard Implementation – 18%
  • Einstein Discovery Story Design – 19%

Of all the Salesforce exams I have taken this is one of the more evenly distributed in terms of material so make sure you cover off all of the areas thoroughly. The exam also covers a lot. Einstein Analytics and Discovery/Tableau CRM is a full platform rather than just an individual product and it shows.

 

Study Resources

If you really want to get really detailed information on everything to do with Einstein then the best place to go is the Salesforce Blogger site where Rikke Hovgaard and others share an absolute ton of tips, tricks and information. A few of the Galacticos team enjoy the blog and even if you have passed the exam I would highly recommend reading through it.

Trailhead has got lots of great trails and resources for you including two very detailed superbadges. I haven’t done the superbadges all the way through. However, they are extremely detailed and completing them will surely ensure you are ready.

Salesforce Einstein Analytics and Discovery Consultant superbadges

I also took one of the Trailhead Academy courses for Tableau CRM, namely the ANC301 course as a refresher as I was familiar with the tool. The course was a really good 3 day deep dive into building out dashboards and managing data. If you have the chance, I would highly recommend attending a course to help prepare you as they contain a lot of detailed info and allow you to ask questions of an expert. As a disclaimer, I do teach some of the developer courses for the Trailhead Academy, but love attending them regardless.

 

Salesforce Einstein Analytics and Discovery Consultant Certified!

 

Salesforce Einstein Analytics and Discovery Consultant Certification

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Certification News – Phil’s Salesforce Tip of the Week #430

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Certification News

This week saw the launch of the latest Salesforce cert, B2C Solution Architect certification. It states “This new certification path expands our Salesforce architect community and allows customers and partners to build the expertise needed to connect marketing, commerce, and service to deliver personalized consumer experiences”.

The first thing to note is the 3 Prerequisites:

  • Salesforce Certified Platform App Builder
  • Salesforce Certified Integration Architecture Designer
  • Salesforce Certified Marketing Cloud Email Specialist

And here are the Trailhead materials recommended for this exam:

The split of subjects :

Discovery and Customer Success: 18%

Functional Capabilities and Business Value: 19%

Architecture Design: 23%

Data Models and Management: 21%

Integration: 19%

If you want some inspiration of where to look for your next Certification take a look at this resource from Salesforce. The certification resource seems up to date, but things change regularly…as you can see!

London’s Calling 2020 (and before)

After the London’s Calling announcement last week they have also now added all the sessions from the 2020 event on the YouTube channel. With some great sessions covering areas such as Platform Events, Salesforce Labs Free Apps, Einstein Analytics, and VS Code. There’s our Christmas viewing sorted then!

 

Spring ‘20 Exams

Don’t worry you have until April 2021, but here is the link to all the maintenance exams for Spring ‘20. And here is the schedule for the full overview of what we need to do throughout 2021.

For Winter’ 21 there are a new set of ‘Designer maintenance module’ exams to maintain any Architect Certs, so make sure you don’t forget them. They are not due until December 2021, but they are available now.

 

Happy Holidays!

I will be back on Christmas Day for next Friday’s Tips, I will try to keep it ‘light and festive’. I wish you a Happy Christmas, and here’s to a happy and especially healthy New Year for you and your family!

Phil's Salesforce Tip of the Week

Mastering apex & events news – Phil’s Salesforce Tip of the Week #429

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DreamTX

DreamTX is split over 14-17th Dec (or 15-18th in EMEA/AsiaPac regions). As well as the full details here, there is also a Developer focused blog post here which highlights some recommended viewings and Q&A sessions.

The Developer focused post highlights sessions covering areas like Lightning Web Components, integrations and APIs, and Salesforce Developer Tooling. But there are plenty more sessions to get booked on your agenda!

And just in case you wondered…’DreamTX’ is the name Marc Benioff decided upon to signify a full ‘Dreamforce Trailblazer Experience’.

 

London’s Calling 2021

Kudos to the London’s Calling team for announcing that they will be back on 19th March 2021 for a virtual event (this time a planned virtual event!) . Just a date for the diary so far, but keep an eye out for registration & tickets. Fingers crossed maybe it could be the opposite for 2021, where we may be unexpectedly allowed to meet in person due to the success of the Covid vaccine, and Francis, Todd, Louise, Kerry, and Amanda may be looking for a last minute venue!? (I don’t wish anyone extra work, but I will still have my fingers crossed for this!).

 

Mastering Apex

Congratulations to our COO Paul Battisson on his new book, out this week, ‘Mastering Apex Programming‘. Publishing his first book earlier this year was a major achievement, but TWO whilst being overworked and in a global pandemic is seriously impressive! I am sure we will write a future guest post with Paul so we can hear more about the book, and the differences between the two, but it is fair to say this builds on top of ‘Learning Salesforce Development with Apex’, and is the next step once you are comfortable with the fundamentals.

STOP PRESS – use code ’25APEX’ for 25% off the ebook on packtpub, or 25% Amazon.com with this link.

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Earning the Salesforce Certified JavaScript Developer I Credential

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At TrailheaDX 2020, the new Salesforce Certified JavaScript Developer I credential was announced. With the move to Lightning Web Components, vanilla JavaScript has become a core programming language on Salesforce, and this certification emphasizes this. I was invited to take the beta exam earlier this year but was unable to do so due to COVID-19. So when the full certification was released, I booked the exam as soon as possible to work on obtaining this new certification. It is composed of two parts; an exam and a superbadge.

Firstly, some background – I have worked extensively with JavaScript outside of Salesforce for a few years writing apps using Node.js and frameworks like React. I was therefore pretty confident in my ability to pass the exam. I am also a Salesforce Certified Instructor and am accredited to teach the Lightning Web Components training for Salesforce, and have used the framework a lot as well so was comfortable I should be able to handle the superbadge. For anyone looking to obtain this credential, I would recommend that they ensure they have spent a good amount of time working with modern vanilla JavaScript. You should have also used Lightning Web Components for more than just reviewing some of the sample apps.

Salesforce JavaScript Developer I Certification Path

The Exam

The exam portion follows the same tried and tested multiple-choice format via Webassessor that we all know and love. You are given 60 questions with a 65% pass mark so need to get at least 39 questions right. This exam also includes 5 unscored questions that I assume will show up in the future on the exam. The exam cover the following areas:

  • Variables, Types, and Collections: 23%
  • Objects, Functions, and Classes: 25%
  • Browser and Events: 17%
  • Debugging and Error Handling: 7%
  • Asynchronous Programming: 13%
  • Server Side JavaScript: 8%
  • Testing: 7%

These top 3 sections between them, if answered correctly, will earn you enough marks to pass the exam. As ever, it is smart to review these sections to decide on focus areas. The exam is code heavy, with lots of JavaScript snippets designed to make you think through what the code is doing and potentially catch you out. It’s no secret that JavaScript has some behaviours that seem strange, so make sure you are comfortable with these behaviours.

Salesforce provide a great set of resources on the Trailhead pages, including some modules to help you understand the newer language features. I would also highly recommend for anyone serious about learning JavaScript the You Don’t Know JS series of books. I have read and re-read them and still always learn something new. The Mozilla Developer Network documentation on JavaScript is also second to none and worth reviewing if you have any weaker areas.

I found the exam challenging but not too onerous, the questions were trying to make you think about the code but were not trying to trick you. As ever, keep calm, read through things thoroughly and you should have no issues.

The Superbadge

The second step to becoming Salesforce JavaScript Developer I certified is to complete the Lightning Web Components Specialist Superbadge. This superbadge has 4 pre-requisite badges that cover the basics of the Lightning Web Components framework to prepare you for the superbadge. This superbadge is tough. It took me a lot longer than I expected, and chatting with others it seems that it is a common experience. You need to read the details of this superbadge really carefully. Some of the requirements are mentioned as only a single word rather than being listed more clearly/explicitly and so can easily be missed. The superbadge involves building out an application to allow you to view boats for rental and leave reviews. All areas of the Lightning Web Component framework are covered, so you will definitely learn how to cover most scenarios.

Lightning Web Components Superbadge App

From my experience, I would encourage you to read and work through the contents before looking at the challenges. The contents of the superbadge wording do not correlate to the order of the challenges and so you can spend a lot of time jumping around the page which gets frustrating and leads to you missing requirements. When checking the challenges expect to receive some errors. Pay particular attention to naming of variables, using the correct case in your code, and even the order of statements. If you can set aside a couple of days to work through this, I would highly recommend it. I was doing this bit by bit in evenings and weekends and it was difficult to remember where things were.

If you get truly stuck, you can get help from the Trailhead support team. Be aware that they do not work weekends so try and raise issues during the week for a prompt response.

Salesforce JavaScript Developer I Certified!

And that is it! Once you have completed both, your certification will be sent over for you. Hopefully this guide has given you some good pointers and helped you on your journey. We look forward to seeing more people sharing their success on this on social media.


Paul Battisson Salesforce JavaScript Developer I Certified

ABOUT CLOUD GALACTICOS

Cloud Galacticos is a Salesforce Consulting Partner with an all-star team. We are user and developer group leaders, bloggers, MVPs and all round Salesforce nerds. We have people all over the UK including Manchester, Leeds, York, Sheffield, and London. If you are looking for a Salesforce partner with experience who can help you make the most of your org, why not give us a call?

Phil's Salesforce Tip of the Week

Salesforce Anywhere and new JavaScript Certification – Phil’s Salesforce Tip of the Week #406

by with No Comment Salesforce EventsTip of the WeekTrailhead

Last week was TrailheaDX, Salesforce’s virtual reimagining of their developer focussed conference and there were a number of exciting new announcements. We have a more detailed blog coming up soon, but wanted to share in this week’s tip what we think are the two biggest announcements; Salesforce Anywhere and the new JavaScript Developer I Certification.

Salesforce Anywhere

Salesforce Anywhere

The biggest new announcement was Salesforce Anywhere, what looks to be a total reimagining of the Salesforce application to massively improve collaboration. The demos showed it featured one on one chat, group chat, voice, video and real time alerts all together in your Salesforce UI. For those familiar with Quip, the discussions feature seems to tie in heavily with how that operates, and the ability to see who else is collaborating on a record will be incredible for team discussions. Chat, voice and video in Salesforce will be great tools to add in to make it easier for teams to continue collaborating where they are already working without needing to context swap. I also think real time alerts are going to be extremely useful for me as an organisation leader, allowing me to keep abreast of what is happening.

The best part – it is an open beta – so if you want to try this out today you can go and sign up to participate in the beta here.

JavaScript Developer I Certification

Salesforce also announced the new JavaScript Developer I Certification which is designed for those working heavily with the Lightning Web Components framework. Like the Platform Developer II certification, this is a combinationTrailhead Superbadge and multiple choice exam so blends practical skills with a more standard exam. I know a few of our team are already looking into this and working away, so hopefully we can soon share some tips on achieving this new certification.

JavaScript Developer I

As I mentioned at the start, there was a lot more to unpack from TrailheaDX so look out for our blog coming soon!

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Choosing Your Certification Path – Phil’s Salesforce Tip of the Week # 401

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This week I want to share with you a fantastic guide from Salesforce on choosing your certification path. Last week for my 400th tip I shared 40 Salesforce learning and study resources to help you on your training. I thought it was a nice follow on that Salesforce released this certification guide to help you plan out which certifications are right for you and which order to take them in.

Choosing Your Certification Path

Choosing Your Certification Path

Choosing the Path That is Right for You

I particularly like 2 things about this guide. Firstly, the paths are broken down by roles which makes it helpful for those starting out to get some guidance. It is really easy to forget for those of us that have been working with Salesforce for so long that when you first start out in the ecosystem the sheer breadth of Salesforce can be very overwhelming. This guide helps make it clearer as to where you can focus.

Secondly, I think the breakdown helps in highlighting that you don’t have to catch them all. Not everyone needs to become a CTA or get every single certification. By having the guide broken down in the way it is, it helps highlight the important ones to make you most effective in your role, rather than just being a catch all of how to get every certification.

In Other News…

New Quip Trail

Continuing the training and learning theme, there is a new Quip Trailhead Trail available. I have to be honest and say Quip is something I have only passing experience in so this is on my list to review to help broaden out my knowledge.

Salesforce Appoints Advisory Board to Support Growth in EMEA

Salesforce view the EMEA region as a key to their continued to grow. It is interesting to see them appoint a board to help support this growth in the region in what I am sure will be a continued push for success outside of the states. A very welcome piece of news for those of us this side of the pond!

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