Passing Your Salesforce ADM201 Certification Exam

I passed the Salesforce ADM201 certification exam today. It's been a five year road to get here. From the first week I began working with Salesforce, I decided attaining certification was something I wanted to pursue.

Now that I've done it, I thought it might be good to share the things that helped me be successful with those looking to do the same.

Know Your Stuff

Your success or failure pretty much boils down to this... You've got to know your stuff or it's never going to happen.

The Salesforce ADM201 certification exam is not a walk in the park. You'll never pass it by just reading the online help, or taking online practice tests and studying flash cards -- most of which are badly outdated, or just plain wrong.

You're going to need to be familiar with just about every area of Salesforce and how it actually works -- where and how you can do something, and where and why you can't do something else.

This means getting a developer org and configuring it just like you would if you were doing it for your day job or a client. Be creative in your approach. Try doing things you've never done. Try to break it. Enter real data and learn how it flows through the system from a Campaign to a converted Lead to a resolved Case.

Learn it, live it, be it...

Do everything in your power to wrap your head around the big picture of what Salesforce does and totally understand it. That's what being a good admin is all about anyway -- knowing what can or can't be done.

Study With a Group

I can't stress this one enough.

My employer was kind enough to purchase a year of Premiere Plus Support in order to provide me the online courses to pursue certification, and I did all 60+ hours of both the ADM201 and DEV401 trainings. I learned a lot from it, but it wasn't until I joined a study group that the learning really sank in.

Collaborating with a group of your peers introduces fresh ideas, which could give you a completely different perspective about a topic. That, in turn, leads to other moments of discovery. If you're serious about earning a certification, I suggest you find others who are as committed as you to passing your exam.

I joined the Salesforce Certification Study Group in the Salesforce Success Community. Deepa Patel and the others who volunteer with the group have worked hard to develop a successful curriculum with a high passing rate for those who are committed enough to make it to the end. It doesn't cost any more than your time and effort, plus the $200 to register for your Salesforce ADM201 certification exam, which you're going to spend anyway.

Once you're accepted into the private group, watch what goes on in the Chatter feed for a while, then when signups for the next round of sessions are announced, join the one that best suits your geographical region.

Make the Time

Okay. You've been accepted into the study group. But if you aren't totally serious about earning your certification, you'll never be successful. Period. You've got to want it to happen. If you don't give studying the attention it needs, you can forget about passing, and may as well stop reading now.

Make it what you think about when you're sitting in traffic, brushing your teeth, or taking a shower. Turn off the TV for a couple hours each night and learn something new about Salesforce instead. Choose to become obsessed for a while.

If you end up joining the certification study group, make time to do the work you're supposed to do before the next session -- every single week. Commit to the 15 weeks the group is going to require from you. Be ready to demo your work for the online sessions. Know exactly what you did, why you did it, and have a reason for it. I promise you'll learn incredible amounts if you commit to working this way.

Be Real with Yourself

Be 100% honest with yourself. Ask yourself "Am I really ready to pursue certification?" If you've only been working with Salesforce a few months, it's going to be a tough row to hoe, even with the help and support of a study group -- who may not be too keen helping you along while studying themselves.

Being part of a group requires commitment. People are depending on you to have ideas that could be different than theirs. Are you really ready to commit to a group of 6-12 people for 15 weeks, and collaborate with them? Are you really ready to do 5 to 8 hours of homework each week? It's going to take serious sacrifice.

If you're not ready, then wait until you are. You have a better chance of succeeding if you do. By joining the study group without enough experience, chances are you'll fall behind fast, which is going to discourage you. Don't set yourself up to fail. Be ready.

Use Good Resources

I mentioned the online tests and flash cards earlier. Don't rely on them at all. Salesforce adds lots of new features at each release. Flash cards and tests from the Spring '11 release are full of misinformation now. If you rely on them to know your stuff, you might not know much at all.

The only other resource you need now is to watch the Dreamforce Get Started on the Certified Administrator Credential workshop video. It provides solid advice for being ready, how to take the Salesforce ADM201 certification exam, and knowing what you're walking into.

Taking Your Exam

You've scheduled your test, and now it's time to go take it.

There's only one thing to be said... Know that you know what you know. If you've worked hard in the Salesforce Certification Study Group, you're ready to pass. Walk in knowing that fact.

When you sit down to begin, take a minute to breathe and relax. Then start your exam using the techniques you learned from the workshop video. Before you know it, you'll be waking out of the testing center as a Salesforce Certified Administrator.

Sharing Parent/Child Accounts with a Single Sharing Rule

I received a request to temporarily share the child accounts under a single parent account with a second rep so he and the owner could work as a team to do a blitz on the schools within a single school district.

The parent school district had almost 300 child school sites below it which needed to be shared fast, and un-shared just as quickly once the blitz was finished.

Unfortunately, Salesforce doesn't allow sharing child accounts under a parent using a single sharing rule with Parent Account Id as the criteria. And since I didn't want to spend my entire day updating these accounts with Account Teams, I had to find a different approach because the second rep needed account access within the hour.

My solution was to add a text field on the Account object that I could load the parent account Id into, and create a criteria based sharing rule on -- kind of a faux Parent Account Id field.



Before getting to the down-and-dirty, there's a couple of gotcha's to keep in mind. Criteria based sharing rules are only available in Personal, Enterprise and Unlimited editions. This will not work for any edition below that. And since you only have 50 criteria based sharing rules available, you should use this technique sparingly.

With that out of the way, here's how I made it happen.

1. First, I created a new "Parent Account Share" text field on the Account object, setting field security viewable by all, editable only by the Admin. I didn't add it to any page layouts.


2. Then, I found all accounts under the parent by creating a report using the Parent Account Id as my filter, with only the Account Id and Parent Account Id columns on the report layout, and exported it in CSV format.


3. In the exported file, I changed the "Parent Account Id" column name to "Parent Account Share" and removed all the extra report fluff at the end of the file (don't forget to do that).


4. Using DataLoader, I updated the accounts, matching column names.


5. Next, I created a Public Group and added both the primary and secondary rep to it. I could have gotten away with just the secondary rep, but I like to have both users in the group so I know who's sharing together.


6. Finally, I created new criteria based sharing rule on the Account object where "Parent Account Share" equals the Id of the parent account I just inserted into the "Parent Account Share" field, sharing it with the group I created, providing the level of Account, Contact, Opportunity & Case access as needed (Read/Write, Read/Write, Private, Private). I also named the group and sharing rule similarly so I know what goes with what.


7. To make sure it worked, I logged in as the second rep to view the child accounts.

So there you have it, a quick way for sharing parent/child accounts when there are an outrageous number of children under a single parent.

Woes of MacBook Pro Unibody Owner

A little more on my MacBook Pro woes...

Since I've had this machine, a MBP Unibody 2.6 Ghz / 4 GB RAM purchased in September of 2009, I've had to back it up, completely wipe the internal HD, and restore 5 times. Two of those times, I've completely zeroed the drive for extra measure. I even tried starting entirely from scratch once hoping that would finally fix my issues to no avail. In that time I've ended up with a "keys out of order" error more times than I can remember. Running a single user "fsck" at boot usually cannot fix the problem. I had to lay out $100 for DiskWarrior to finally resolve that. Still, through all of that, I seem to keep coming up with issues on this unit. I've never had this much trouble with any Mac I've owned--ever.

Here are the symptoms that eventually lead up to the disk to going bad: When putting the machine to sleep for more than an hour by closing the clamshell, upon waking by re-opening it, the MBP will spontaneously log itself out, sometimes only once, other times it will happen multiple times in a row (I think I counted 5 logouts once). Usually, after all that excitement, any app that I try to launch will immediately crash. I do not keep any apps running when putting the unit to sleep anymore. I've lost too much work because of it. Twice I've gotten kernel panics instead of spontaneous log outs. It is far more likely that this machine will wake with an issue than not.

Logs allude to crashed threads in windowserver, CoreGraphics, as well as a video driver (not sure which right now). I've tried removing every single system add-on that I've ever installed, but still have problems. I've also cleared every single cache I can get my hands on and then some, but still have problems.

Right now, I'm testing the memory using Memtest. When I left for work this morning, it had not found any problems yet. If it were as simple as a bad memory module I'd be thrilled -- but to be honest, I'm thinking the problem lies in the 7200 RPM drive I had installed as a BTO option when I ordered it from Apple. It's always seemed to be a little finicky.

Because of this lemon fresh Mac, I've lost countless hours, and have fallen way behind schedule on a project that I promised would be delivered a month ago. I'm finally giving up and visiting the Genius Bar at my local Apple store tomorrow. So far, I've had pretty good luck with them helping me solve issues with other machines. Hopefully they can with this one too. I just hope I don't have to send it back to China to get fixed. That would put me another month (or more) behind schedule.

More to follow, I'm sure...