Friday, February 27, 2015

Let’s get certified! Salesforce.com Certified Sales Cloud Consultant Exam

About 

This exam is designed for Sales cloud consultants that have hands on knowledge and skills in designing and implementing sales cloud solutions. Familiarity with both sales and marketing organizations is a plus point. Your on the job experience and self-study will maximize the chances of passing this exam.

As I prepare myself for the Sales cloud consultant exam, I will be sharing my study notes and guidelines on this blog. I might not follow the exact sequence but all the topics that we discuss here can be found in the Study Guide.

Note – This post is still a work in progress, I will update it as I get time.

About the Exam:
  • Go to Certification.salesforce.com
  • Register for the exam
  • Read and print a copy of study guide
  • Questions: 60 multiple choice questions
  • Exam duration: 1 hour 45 minutes
  • Passing score: 68%
  • Exam fee: $200, retake fee $100

Study Notes: 


Online course: Preparing for the Certified Sales Cloud Consultant Exam

Video Content:

In this video Jp lie talks about how to prepare for sales cloud certification. Study guide is a great guide line.  Practical industry experience is needed out in the field which provides the grass roots for this exam. For those who don’t have enough experience can create their own developer org and practice the online implementation guide. Following implementation guides were useful for the exam- Campaign management and sharing architecture. Seek out other projects from your org and take help from a mentor either a study group or online who can guide you when you need assistance. When taking exam read each question carefully since there are hidden clues that can lead you to the right answer. Mark your questions for review if you are not sure. There will be many scenario based questions, it’s important to comprehend all the elements on the scratch paper.

Benefits of getting certified-

Instant credibility that you will get out in the industry. It shows you have achieved the level of competency and this will set you apart. Sales loud certification will also help you to implement complex solutions out in the field.
Next: Setting Up and Building Communities

Stay Tuned!




Thursday, February 26, 2015

Salesforce Advanced Admin Certification

Advanced admin exam is designed for professionals who have hands-on experience working in salesforce. Being certified shows that your skills are up to date, you are passing the industry's measurement of knowledge based on their skills assessments and you are at the top of your game!  I have provided some tips in my blog which will help you in preparing yourself for advanced admin exam.


About Spring 15' Exam:
  • Prerequisite: Administrator certification
  • Exam duration: 90 minutes, 
  • Total questions: 60 multiple choice questions
  • Exam options: Onsite proctored or offsite
  • Passing score: 65%
  • Exam registration: Webassessor  
  • Exam fees: $ 200 and $100 retake fee
Tips:
  • Register for the exam and prepare your timeline.
  • Set aside few hours every day for the exam preparation.
  • Set a task of reading at least one topic everyday during your office hours.
  • Update what you studied in an excel sheet.
  • Monitor your progress.
  • Salesforce.com Certified Advanced Administrator study guide is your best buddy.
  • “Recommended Training and References” videos listed in the study guide.
  • Online Sample questions- You can refer online sample questions but do not trust the answers. Find your own answers taking help from Help & Training link.
Questions
  • What are the options available when you deploy a change set?
  • There were many scenario based questions on Master details relationship, Lookup, Many to Many and Hierarchical.
  • Security questions, for example if this field is not visible how will you trouble shoot.
  • ABC profile needs access to following objects in your company current OWD settings are this, how will you provide access?
  • Questions on login hours, data loader, import wizard
  • This is the scenario which deployment tool will you use?
Salesforce.com Advanced Administrator Sample Questions - Part 1

Salesforce.com Advanced Administrator Sample Questions - Part 2

Salesforce.com Advanced Administrator Sample Questions - Part 3 


Salesforce.com Advanced Administrator Sample Questions - Part 4 
 
Most of my Spring 15 Advanced Admin questions circled around the following topics-
  • Territory Management (around 4 questions)
  • Reports and Dashboard around 5 questions
  • Knowledge Articles (around 3 questions)
  • Inbound change set (around 2 questions)
  • Outbound change set (around 2 questions)
  • Master detail relationship
  • Lookup relationship
  • Hierarchical relationship
  • Many-to-Many relationship
  • Sharing settings
  • Debug Log
  • Setup Audit Trail
  • Product and Pricing
  • Permissions Set
  • Profile
  • Modify and View All Data
  • Service cloud
  • Questions on Sandbox
  • Content Management and Cases
  • Case Feed
  • Salesforce Knowledge
  • Validation Formulas
  • Workflow Rule formulas
  • Forecasting
  • Portal
  • Chatter
  • Community
  • Security
  • Data loader
Exam questions are designed keeping in mind how an admin will respond to a business requirement or a problem and what is the best possible approach that you will provide. While taking the test I made two columns,  on one side count of questions that I am certain and the other side the ones that I am not sure. This approach gave me confidence to perform better by looking at the numbers. I was pretty sure on 43 questions and 17 were so- so.  

I found most of the questions were in this format:

In universal container this is the problem, what would you do to resolve this issue or request?

1)      This can be an option but I am not sure
2)      Not an answer
3)      I haven’t worked on this but I am pretty sure this is not the answer
4)      This may or may not be the right answer

I faced a lot of scenario based questions where I got stuck in two options and then I revisited those options and analyzed as an admin what would I do.

For example:

A customer would like to submit direct support request. How would you do it? Pick two.

A)     Chatter Answer (this looks confusing why Chatter Answer? Well this option is available on publisher action but makes no sense. This feature is used to answer on the chatter post. Can I submit support request using chatter answer? Probably not. )

B)     Service Cloud (For sure this is one answer- Service cloud is a customer service application used for customer support, chat, case etc.)

C)     Live Chat on your company website. ( I haven’t worked on this feature but this makes sense because from lice chat you can create direct case in salesforce)

D)     Case Feed (Clearly not an answer- Case feed helps support agents to manage cases not the customers.)

So after brain storming every question you can find out which option is the closest that makes sense.

Answer is B and C

I hope this blog will help you all in your exam preparation. Its time for you to ramp up and gain acknowledgement for your salesforce skills by getting advanced admin certified. 

Lastly, believe in yourself and FOLLOW the path you've chosen. I wish you all the best! 

Post your questions or comments below!






Wednesday, February 25, 2015

Limitations of Waterfall Development Process

Waterfall methodology is a sequential design process that develops in a downward pattern.Once the water has flown down the stream it cannot turn back. In waterfall development, rigorous planning and documentation is done prior to initiating the build of the project. Waterfall involves linear sequence of tasks and activities where each phase is fully defined followed by the design, build, testing, deployment and maintenance. 



Project management team and business analyst make sure that the business understand what will be delivered before the build phase begins, for this sign-off is taken on the requirements so that all the folks are on the same page. Once the sign-off is done no more requirements are added. 

Stakeholders dedicate considerable amount of time upfront helping business analyst to understand the requirements. Any issues with the requirements are identified even before the build phase starts. If the requirements are correct it is easy to allocate the budget and resources. Revisiting the requirements can be expensive once the built has begun.If the requirements are changed during the course of the project, project struggles to respond to these changes effectively and the timeline is affected. In waterfall stakeholder involvement is minimum during the build phase which makes the project difficult to adapt the changing needs of the stakeholder.  

Often large projects that use waterfall are delivered late since they fail to meet the customer’s expectations or the requirements change over the built phase. This is because waterfall has lot of dependency on the requirements, and stakeholders often change the requirements during the long course of the project. This is the truth because initially at the beginning of the project the requirements are unclear and over the period of time business realize the provided requirements are deflected than what they vision.

Example:

It’s been 1 year into a waterfall project and a new Stakeholder has taken over the project. Development team had already developed a lot based on the initial requirements however the new stakeholder has different business objectives and provided new requirements, priorities and timeline. The development team is absolutely not happy with this, since a lot has already been built but to satisfy the business, development team makes the changes to the project and continues developing and delivering the new product. If team had used an approach that accommodated the requirement changes and such shifts the damage would have been far less compared to waterfall. Agile methodology is recommended for such projects. Agile development method is based on the iterative and incremental approach to software development, it involves continues collaboration of team members, stake holder, business users and frequent delivery of useful functionality. The baseline for agile methodology is change driven approach to plan driven approach.

Monday, February 23, 2015

Mass Update Button on Lead List View


In many companies we face challenges where business is not comfortable using data loader and other tools to perform mass update on day to day basis. It can be very tiring to manually mass update the records and perform same job everyday. How about we have a magical button that does the job with one click. Yes, salesforce does provide few standard buttons for mass update. You will find buttons like New lead, Change owner, Change status, Add campaign, Accept etc. on leads list view.


It is also true that these standard buttons have limited functionality to update specific characteristic of the records like “Change owner” can mass update only the owner for the selected records.

Usually we see that coding stuff is handled by the developers, however admins can still try their hands on some basic stuffs like creating a custom button by taking reference of online resources. In this post I will discuss how I was able to take help of online code and built a custom button to do mass update on leads. 

Given below is the scenario:

ABC corporation has leads coming in  from various sources like - emails, trade shows, conferences, events, web forms etc. On day to day basis, tele-business reps work on more than 100 leads a day. This team plays significant role in nourishing cold leads and then hands them over to the Sales team. The folks have come to you discussing their pain point of how they spend hours of time manually updating the leads. Another pain point  is that since multiple teams are involved in nourishing the leads,  defining the ownership is a challenge given that there is only one lead owner field.

There may be a better way to do this, but I followed following approach:

Step 1: To clearly define the ownership let us create a custom lookup field - “Tele Service Rep” on the lead object. Tele business lookup field will show who owns this lead from their team whereas lead owner will  define the sales representative working on the lead from the sales team.

Step 2: Tele business team require a mass update button on the list view that can help them to quickly update and take the ownership of leads. This will help in the accelerated uptake, turnovers and turnarounds.

Note: A list view displays records that meets the current search criteria to which the user has access to. List buttons allow users to select multiple items in the list and perform an action on all of them at once.Buttons display at the top of the details page.

Step 3: Create a New Custom lookup field “ Tele business Rep”


Step 4: Select lookup as data type



Step 5: Choose related object as Lead

Step 6: Enter Label for the lookup field

Step 7: Select Field level security 


Step 8: Add your new field to the lead page layout

Step 9: Your new lookup field is available on your lead object

Step 10: Let us create a custom button for Tele-service team

Go to Setup--> Leads-->Buttons Links and Actions 

Step 11: Create New Button or Link. Select List Button. 

This option creates a new button that you can add to the list view of lead or related list.  



Step 12: Select the behavior, behavior defines what should happen when the user clicks the button. Select the behavior as “Execute the JavaScript”. This option executes your OnClick JavaScript code when the user clicks your button or link. 


Step 13: Paste the code as given below. It is very important to check if there are any syntax error. Click on “Check Syntax”


Step 14: Select your merge fields from the insert field drop down. 


Step 15: Now we need to add the button we created to the lead list view.

Go to Setup --> Lead--> Search Layout--> Lead List view

Step 16: Add the custom button and save.



Step 17: Go to the Lead list view and validate the button's functionality. 


You are done. Enjoy your new custom button that can mass update leads in seconds. 



CODE

{!REQUIRESCRIPT("/soap/ajax/31.0/connection.js")} //adds the proper code for inclusion of AJAX toolkit
{!REQUIRESCRIPT("/soap/ajax/31.0/apex.js")}
var url = parent.location.href; //This is a string for the current page URL
var records = {!GETRECORDIDS($ObjectType.Lead)}; //Picks the Lead records that the user is requesting to update
var updateRecords = []; //array for holding records that this code will ultimately update
if (records.length == 0) { //if the button was clicked but there was no record selected
alert("Please select at least one record to update."); //We want to alert the user to select at least one record to update
} else { //otherwise, there was a record selection

var r = confirm("You are about to change the Tele Service Rep on " + records.length + " records. Continue?"); //Alert the user about the update
if (r == true) { \\If user selects ok to update the records
for (var a=0; a<records.length; a++){ //for all records
var update_Lead = new sforce.SObject("Lead"); //create a new sObject to store the updated lead record details
update_Lead.Id = records[a]; //set the Id of the selected Lead record
update_Tele_Business_Rep__c = '{!$User.Id}'; //Update the Tele business rep lookup field to the current user who clicks the button 
updateRecords.push(update_Lead); //add the updated record to our array
}
result = sforce.connection.update(updateRecords); //push the updated records back to Salesforce
var numSuccess = 0; //The integer value of var on success
var numFails = 0; //The integer value of var on failure
var failMessage = "";
for (var i=0; i<records.length; i++) {
if (result[i].getBoolean("success")) {
numSuccess = numSuccess + 1;
} else {
numFails = numFails + 1;
 if (numFails==1){
 failMessage=result[i].errors.message;
 }
}
}
if (numFails > 0) {
alert("Successes: " + numSuccess + " Failures: " + numFails + "\nFirst Error: " + failMessage);
} else {
alert("Successes: " + numSuccess + " Failures: " + numFails);
}
}
parent.location.href = url;
}