Community Cloud Consultant certification

September 1, 2016 – the very first day you were able to attend Salesforce Community Cloud Consultant certification and pay for it. I wasn’t able to make it as no free slots were available.

A few days latter I got the chance and passed. Was it hard or easy to pass, as you need just 57 % pass rate? How did I study, what are my experiences?

The Materials

I had no real previous experience with communities, so I followed the study guide provided by Salesforce. I did the Trailhead, read the Salesforce Communities Implementation (Getting Started with Communities) PDF from the beginning to the end, mostly skipped the Community Templates (Using Templates to Build Communities) PDF, checked the latest release notes and Salesforce website. I’m not like Salesforce Ben who has to print everything, I’m happy to read it on computer and save some trees. A few days later and some small experimentation with communities I’ve been ready to tackle the exam.

The Exam

OK, it was challenging.

I got some questions about licences and found out, that read the pricing page on website is not enough. There are some Customer Community Plus licences as well, so I had to take some guesses here.

I had a lot of questions about Super User access and I wasn’t really sure what the right answer is. Just imagine – you have 120 000 partner accounts, would Super User access the right solution? Or is account owner better? How can user rules help me? And what about sharing rules – criteria based, owner based or APEX managed sharing? And what about internal users and anonymous access, will it play together? I would say these questions were about 50 % of the exam.

Some questions about templates, mainly which template to use when I need access to custom objects, how I can setup landing page, how recommendation works and whether I have to use Recommendation component or Featured recommendations component (not sure about the names, hope I’ll find them on the palette when needed).

And then some „non important“ questions about flagging content, keywords (do you know you can have just 2000 of them in a list?), how voting works and how can you choose how many articles will be visible on main page or when searching. How can you easily customize colors in your template – use the predefined schemes, manually enter HEX codes, download it from other webpage or automatically generate from uploaded logo (for real).

Do it

It was definitely challenging but doable. As always, the „that would be nice“ answer was probably the right one. I’m pretty sure Salesforce Ben will prepare some training materials on this one as well and I can recommend mock exams, for which you have to pay (10$ for a lifetime membership) but as part of the deal you’ll also get a ton of discounts for other applications. I didn’t use any discount yet, but I can see some I might use.