I finally had time to read this book and I really like the book in general. At the same time, and I highly recommend the book for it, you might be surprised with the simplicity of CTA board. On almost 600 pages Tameem guide you through all the different areas you need to cover during the board, practically show the solution on mini scenarios and even put two scenarios including solutions.
And that might be the challenge. If you go over the scenarios and you see the argumentation and real sentences you should/need to use, it looks super simple. Simple English, simple sentences, is this really enough for the board? It must be super easy to pass then, right?
And actually that’s the challenge of the board. Get the technical knowledge, which looked to be the hardest part at the beginning, is practically the easiest part of the experience. The presentation, including all the info you need to include, is way harder and is the part you really need to practice.
During a normal project, you might find yourself working with multiple IAM experts from different technological backgrounds. You need to be able to speak the same language as they do, understand their vision, and challenge their architectural design (if needed). As a Salesforce CTA, you are expected to step away from the standard platform knowledge to provide expert guidance in other related matters.
When you think about it, that summarise the role pretty well and make it challenging at the same time. You basically need to be expert on multiple different subjects outside Salesforce as well and I would not limit it to oAuth flow or integration patterns, I would extend the exam with knowledge of DNS, DKIM, SPF, relays and other things as they are super important in these days and internet full of spam.
„The architect are used to bounce ideas on each other“ he writes at other place and there are small sentences where I’m thinking whether he is just testing me or I feel thing wrongly:
- By default, the customer community license users can only access the account related to their contact records. This automatically fulfils the requirement that they should only have access to cases related to their account. Oh really? I would not say so myself, I still strongly believe sharing set needs to be in place. Yes, there is that small checkbox that you can see all cases where you are listed as a contact but even that is no by default based on account visibility;
- I will utilize a Salesforce autolaunched flow to update the opportunity ownership and set it to the sales agent’s queue of that country. Well, sadly, queue ownership for opportunities is not done yet 🙁 Actually did you know that the previous owner will still have read access?
- It will be delivered to both orgs as an unmanaged package. This will allow the solution to be centrally managed and updated. Actually, unmanaged package cannot be upgraded, maybe you spoke about unlocked?
- You can archive your data to … Heroku. We already have Heroku in our landscape. The decision should be easy in this case. We can utilize Heroku Connect to transfer the data. Ok, now what about the archival, removing from the instance and surfacing back when needed?
- Salesforce Canvas is a paid feature, I didn’t know that!
I’m not sure whether these small details across the whole book can make a difference between success and failure, but some of them can make you a headache. Especially the opportunity ownership might mean you want to convert the lead later or invent additional automation for sharing.
If you are on the road to the CTA I highly recommend this book. It will show you have you should see through the requirements and how to put the solution into short, cohesive and highly informative sentences which you can say really quickly.
This book, which you can buy from Amazon or any preferred seller, together with the Salesforce Architect’s Handbook can be a nice addons into your library.