I received some emails from Salesforce last week, letting me know it's time I took my Spring 2013 Maintenance Exam for both of my certifications.
I first went to the Release Training site and noticed this time around there were only three tutorials: Chatter, Sales Cloud and Data.com. I was a little taken back. That's it? Last release there were 6 training tutorials, I thought. I followed the instructions given in the email for my Administrator Release Exam and studied these topics, using the training provided.
- Describe the considerations for setting up the beta version of State and Country Picklists
- Describe the capabilities of Forecasts
- Describe the capabilities of Chatter Tasks
- Describe the enhancements to Chatter
- Describe the enhancements to Salesforce for Outlook
That was not too bad. I went through the tutorials twice and went for the exam. The questions were straightforward. If you go through the training once or twice, you should be ready for the exam.
After completing the Adminstrator Release Exam, I turned to my Force.com Developer Release Exam. I read the email and read through the topics to be covered in the exam:
- Describe the considerations for setting up the beta version of State and Country Picklists
- Describe the use cases for criteria-based sharing
- Describe the implications of organization-wide defaults
- Describe object relationships in Salesforce
- Describe the features of the Salesforce multitenant architecture
Now I was really taken aback. Only the first bullet is new to Spring 2013. The other four bullets all seem to be old topics. This email (unlike the old for Admin) also provides a list of topics that it advises us to study in detail before the exam:
- Overview of Object Relationships
- Considerations for Relationships
- Creating Custom Object Sharing Rules
- Criteria-Based Sharing Rules Overview
- Securing Data Access
- Overview of Sharing Settings
- Setting Your Organization-Wide Sharing Defaults
I decided to go through all these topics from the Help and Training site. Maybe there were something new to this release in these area that I was not aware of. Nothing. Nothing's changed. I was really starting to wonder if there were printing errors in the email.
I thought, well, OK, I haven't looked at these topics for awhile, so I will just do what is outlined in the exam guide. I spent a few hours going through all the above Help topics and then went for the exam.
Boy was I glad. I am sure I would've passed the Release Exam anyway even if I didn't study for it, but by re-familiarizing myself with these old topics, I finished the exam a lot quicker than I think I would have if I didn't study. I finished the exam in about 25 seconds and submitted, and done!
The moral of this story is simply that, make sure you follow the study guideline, and you will pass the exams with flying colours!!