The Complete Salesforce Certified Associate Course

We get started with information on the importance of this new certification from Salesforce.

Here you will learn how to sign up for a free Trailblazer account on Salesforce's learning platform, Trailhead.

As we are getting started, here are a few initial things that may prove helpful to your journey.

In this lesson, I navigate to the Salesforce Certified Associate Exam Guide. I then review the Exam Outline and other key features of this certification exam.

In this introductory lesson, I get you familiar with the first Knowledge Area of the exam guide, Salesforce Ecosystem. We review the various learning objectives found in the guide for this Knowledge Area.

In this lesson, I show you how you can launch your Trailhead Playground from inside of Trailhead.

In this lesson, we explore the future outlook of Salesforce jobs and what is often referred to as the Salesforce economy. We explore a press release and white paper based on IDC's research into the Salesforce Economy, as well as the future outlook on jobs and revenue.

In this lesson, I discuss the Salesforce Partner ecosystem. I address the two main types of Salesforce Partners:

• Independent Software Vendors (ISVs)

• Consultants

I share several resources such as the Partner homepage as well as how to find Partner companies on Salesforce's own app store - AppExchange.

In this lesson, I demonstrate joining the Trailblazer Community. Once inside the Trailblazer Community, I start following people and topics, as well as joining several groups. I also show you how to control your notification emails for daily or weekly digests, and more.

In this lesson, I discuss the various learning items that Salesforce employs inside of Trailhead. There you will find Trails, Trailmixes, Modules, Project and Quests. I discuss what each of these are because they will likely make an appearance on the Associate exam.

In this lesson, I introduce you to the Trust site. It is here that you can view any performance issues on any instances (servers) of Salesforce. I demonstrate how you can find your instance of Salesforce for your Trailhead Playground account. I then subscribe for alerts on the Status website for my instance of Salesforce for my Trailhead Playground account.

In this lesson, I discuss the concepts of multi-tenant architecture and shared resources, limits, etc.

It is here that we begin to look closer at each of the primary cloud offerings from Salesforce. We start with the oldest and most established cloud of Salesforce, which would be the Sales Cloud.

The next cloud that we look at is the Service Cloud. It is here that you are focused on Service and Support.

I discuss the Marketing Cloud and a couple of key acquisitions that Salesforce has made in the past which have become the modern day Marketing Cloud.

The Commerce Cloud came to be primarily through the acquisition of Demandware. I discuss the core components and use cases for the Commerce Cloud in this lesson.

In this lesson, I introduce you to the Experience Cloud. This was formerly known as Communities, and before that, Portals.

There's different types of Experiences / Communities / Portals you can create, such as those specifically for customers, employees, or partners.

In this lesson, I discuss non-profit solutions provided by Salesforce. I introduce the Power of Us program where you can get your own non-profit organization signed up for a free Salesforce account with up to 10 user licenses.

Salesforce acquired Tableau for an improved Analytics experience.

Mulesoft is another acquisition for Salesforce and is their primary solution for integrations.

Slack is yet another acquisition of Salesforce's and is used for Collaboration.

Salesforce Data Cloud, which was formerly known as Genie, was announced at Dreamforce 2022 and is Salesforce's solution for real-time data.

There are many different career paths and job roles in the Salesforce ecosystem. In this lesson, I introduce you to the Career Paths section on Trailhead as well as an overview of some of the primary Salesforce job roles. You will find scenario-based questions on the exam related to which job role would fulfill certain common tasks on the platform.

We are now entering into the second Knowledge Area of the exam - Navigation.

This section will test you navigation skills on the Salesforce platform.

We start things off with an overview of this knowledge area and its accompanying learning objectives.

In this lesson, I launch my hands-on org from my Trailhead account.

In this lesson, I show you how to get your login credentials and how to set your password for your playground org. This way you can login to your Salesforce instance from outside of Trailhead as well.

You don't get your login credentials to not use them. This lesson is where we put those creds to use by logging in.

Let's launch some apps.

We utilize the aptly named App Launcher to do just that. We also customize the order of appearance of our apps inside the App Launcher by moving them.

You'll find more than just Apps in the App Launcher. In this lesson, we explore the All Items section.

In this lesson, I introduce you to the Salesforce Recycle Bin. You can access your own Recycle Bin as well as the Organization Recycle Bin.

I then demonstrate the process of restoring deleted items from the Recycle Bin to give those records a second chance.

In this lesson, you get familiar with List Views. I add filters to a List View and save it as a new one.

You can adjust the fields that display in a List View. In this lesson, I'll show you how.

You can perform mass actions to records from a list view.

Did you know that the limit to the number of rows that can display in a List View is 2000?

Now you do.

In this lesson, I demonstrate how you can display a list view in the Kanban format. We look at an Opportunity List View in the Kanban display format and I demonstrate how to move opportunities from one column to the next in order to change stages. We also note how the totals for each of the Stage columns updates accordingly for the total amounts for each.

I also demonstrate how to change the stage of multiple opportunities from a table list view.

The third format available for List Views is Split View. In this lesson, I demonstrate how to turn on this view and how it functions.

Related Lists can be found on individual record detail pages. Related Lists display any related records to the record you are currently viewing.

You can make customizations to your Salesforce experience and change your Personal Settings. In this lesson, I show you how.

In this lesson, we make edits to an Account Detail Page using the Lightning App Builder. I move a Potential Duplicates component to the Details tab on the Account page and then save and activate it for use.

In this lesson, we will update your user account and also access Advanced User Details from your Personal Settings screen.

The Activity Timeline displays any activities that have performed on a record, such as Tasks, Events, Logged Calls and Emails sent.

In this lesson, I show you how you can add an email signature to your outgoing emails sent by Salesforce.

In this lesson, we create a new user account. We assign this new user the Custom Sales Profile. We discover once we log in as the new user that we are logged in to the Salesforce Classic interface, which we will address in the next lesson.

In this lesson, we address the issue of our newly created user account logging into Classic and not being able to access the Lightning interface. We fix this by going back to our admin account and adjusting the Custom: Sales Profile for John Doe.

Once we have added the Lightning Experience User System Permission to the Profile, John Doe is now able to switch back and forth between Lightning and Classic interfaces. We also toggled the Enhanced Profile Interface off and on in the User Management Settings section of Setup to see the impact between the two settings.

There are times you'll need to change a user's name and/or email address in Salesforce. In this lesson, I show you how to take care of those scenarios.

We review the login history of our new user account by accessing their user detail record by going to Setup > Users > Users

You can save records, reports and more to your Favorites inside of Salesforce. This collects things in one place for your reference and easy access.

In this lesson, I demonstrate how to follow records and receive notifications in Chatter.

Chatter supports Public and Private Groups. I demonstrate creating a group and discuss the differences between Public and Private Groups along with how to invite others to either.

The Global Search can search for keywords across all of Salesforce. In this lesson, I show you how to search globally in Salesforce.

You can filter your search results in the Global Search of Salesforce. Here, I show you how.

It's now time to dive deeper into the third Knowledge Area of the exam - Data Model. We review the learning objects for this section in the exam guide.

Now that we are getting into the various objects of Salesforce, it is time to leverage the Salesforce Glossary as a helpful resource.

The Object Manager is accessible from Setup and lists all of the objects in your Org. It is from the Object Manager that you can also create new objects, which are called Custom Objects.

I use the Schema Builder to display the relationships between the core CRM objects related to Marketing, Sales and Service.

In this lesson, we look at the Lead Conversion process. Whenever a Lead is converted, an Account, Contact and Opportunity record (optionally) are created.

We visit the Schema Builder to get a visual on how these different objects relate to one another.

We also make not of the Opportunity Contact Roles object that resides between the Opportunity and the Contact objects as well.

In this lesson, we discuss an account hierarchy by setting parent accounts for a couple of account records.

You can associate a contact record with more than one account in Salesforce. In this lesson, we enable doing just that.

In this lesson, we adjust the page layout for the Account detail page to include the Related Contacts related list. We then remove the Contacts related list to avoid redundancy. We then associate a Contact record to multiple accounts, one of which is inside of an account hierarchy and one that is not.

In this lesson we create a new custom object called Access Card. These access card records will be used to record any access cards that are assigned to a contact record.

In this lesson, we look at the standard fields that are automatically created upon the creation of a custom object. We note the limited editing options for standard fields.

Creating a lookup field in Salesforce is covered in this lesson.

In this lesson, we create a custom field called Status for our custom object Access Cards. We will use this new picklist field to denote which access card is currently active for its related contact.

In this lesson, we edit both the Lightning Page using the Lightning App Builder as well as the underlying Page Layout using the Enhanced Page Layout Editor.

We first remove the Potential Duplicates component from the Related Lists section of the Lightning Page and save and activate it as the org default. We next go into the Enhanced Page Layout Editor to re-order the order of Related Lists as well as to add additional columns to the Related List.

Before we can create a roll-up summary field to count the number of active access cards there are on a Contact record, we will need to convert our Lookup Field to a Master-Detail relationship.

Please note that if you receive a warning that you cannot change the Contact Lookup field to Master-Detail Relationship, that is because every Access Card record in your org must have a Contact populated. If that is the case, associate every Access Card with a Contact record and then you can convert the data type change.

We begin the process of creating our Roll-Up Summary field on the Contact object to give us a count of the active Access Cards that belong to a Contact. We hit a roadblock in that we need a numeric value by which we can add up those Active cards. We will create a formula field in the next lesson to overcome this obstacle.

In this lesson, we create a Formula field on the Access Card object to assign a value of 1 to active Access Cards and 0 to Inactive. We then create a Roll-Up Summary field to sum up the total derived from the formula field which we use as the field to aggregate to total up the value of all Access Cards. We will use this field to block more than 1 active card being assigned to a contact.

In this lesson, we create a validation rule to enforce only one active access card on a contact record.

In this lesson, I create a Reason Lost field on the Opportunity object. We will use this field in the next lesson to create a Validation Rule that will require it to be populated whenever an Opportunity is set to Closed - Lost.

In this lesson, we create a validation rule to require a reason lost whenever an opportunity is lost.

In this lesson, we test our validation rule.

In this lesson, we create a custom field on our custom object and populate the field with a default value using the formula editor.

In this lesson, we remove a field from a page layout.

In this lesson, we disable secure and persistent browser caching in our org to see the changes to our page layout.

You should be aware that whenever you change a custom field from one data type to another, there are certain situations where you may cause data loss in your org. In this lesson, I share a couple of help articles for you to reference, in order to understand those scenarios.

In this lesson, I create a dependent picklist.

In this lesson, we create three Record Types on the Account object to differentiate between Customer, Partner, and Prospect accounts.

Page layout names that don't correspond with their Record Type can cause confusion. In this lesson, I rename the page layouts so that they are consistent and we make changes to the page layouts so that they are more specific to their assigned record types.

In this lesson, we test our page layout assignments to verify that the SLA fields only display on Customer accounts.

Since we have retired the use of the field dependency between Type and SLA, we will want to remove the field dependency between those two fields. This improves the user experience since we are now hiding SLA fields for all account records except those with an Account Record Type of Customer.

It may be helpful to add the Record Type field to your page layouts. This way you can see at the individual record level which record type, if any, that the record belongs to. This will help facilitate updating any legacy accounts that existed prior to your implementation of Record Types on the Account object.

A Guide to Sharing Architecture is a resource that goes into various security mechanisms that Salesforce uses in their Security Model.

Users must be assigned a profile.

Permission Sets are similar to Profiles, but you can assign multiple Permission Sets to a user. In this lesson, we explore the use cases and implications of utilizing Permission Sets.

In this lesson, we revisit the Guide to Sharing Architecture to lay a groundwork for our understanding of Organization-Wide Defaults. These are often referred to as Org-Wide Defaults or OWD, for short.

A good security model is structured as its most restrictive at its base. And that is set at the OWD level in Salesforce.

The Role Hierarchy is used to share records vertically within your org chart. In this lesson, I introduce you to the Role Hierarchy in your org.

Sharing Rules are used to share records horizontally in your org. In this lesson, we create a Sharing Rule to share opportunities owned by the Eastern Sales Team with those that are assigned the Western Sales Team Role. We also note that to share the other direction, we would need to create another Sharing Rule.

In this lesson, we create a Public Group to include both the Eastern and Western Sales Team role members so that we can just use one sharing rule to share the opportunities between them. We also discuss that there are Public Groups in Chatter as well as Private Groups. We discuss the differences between these different types of groups in Salesforce.

You can manually share records with other Salesforce users. In this lesson, I demonstrate manual sharing, where we share an opportunity record with users that reside both laterally and vertically in our Role Hierarchy.

In this lesson, we create a Case Queue for trouble tickets related to Hardware issues.

In this lesson we create a start to a Digital Experience and publish it. You can use a Digital Experience to provide your customers with a Knowledge Base to hopefully answer their questions and avoid the creation of unnecessary cases, which is referred to as Case Deflection.

You can dynamically show and hide fields on a Lightning page.

In this lesson, I discuss declarative vs. programmatic development.

In this lesson, I discuss the use cases for Sandboxes, which are to not be confused with Trailhead Playgrounds (which are not sandboxes).