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# Course Structure - Admin Study Guide

Here's a structure of all the learning that you have to do in the journey to become a smart Salesforce admin. While the Internet has all the content that you can imagine and Salesforce Trailhead does a good job of organising it for admins, we often felt the need for a more "ah-i-get-it" structure that is also easy to teach students from non-Salesforce background.

So, here's an opinionated learning structure that contains all of the great content, but organised differently. We have created presentation guides for teachers (you will find them under Teaching Aids section under each chapter) and that reflects the same structure as well.

The structure outlined below has been applied in dozens of classes - so you can be rest assured that the "thing" works. But, we are always listening to new ideas. We understand if this way of teaching/understanding Salesforce does work for you, but appreciate if you could tell us your opinion!

# Lesson 1: Introduction, CRM & Salesforce.com Overview

  1. Course Introduction
    • Overview and objectives of this course
    • Admin certification overview
    • Preparation from Day 1: Theory, Workshops, Notes, Flash Cards
  2. CRM Overview
    • What is CRM?
    • CRM - Business & Technology
    • Modern CRM systems
  3. Cloud Computing
    • Overview of cloud computing
    • SaaS, PaaS and IaaS
  4. Introduction to Salesforce
    • Overview of Salesforce
    • Salesforce editions
    • Platform, horizontal and industry Solutions
    • High-level architecture
  5. Workshop: SFDC Basics
    • Navigate SFDC ecosystem
    • Setup your sandbox

# Lesson 2: Platform Fundamentals

  1. SFDC App
    • Overview
    • Components: Tabs, Detail Pages, Records & Related Lists
    • Chatter
  2. Workshop: Navigate and Identify Salesforce Platform Enablers
    • Create your first Salesforce.com App
    • Identify configuration components
  3. Demo-driven Lessons: AppExchange
    • Identify use cases and apps
    • Trial, Test-drive apps
    • Consultants
    • Components
  4. Organization & Access Setup
    • Org setup: Company information
    • Personal Information & Access
    • User Management
    • Data and access security: Roles, OWDs, Profiles, Permission Sets
    • Standard and Special Considerations for Security
    • Access restrictions
  5. Workshop: Apps and Access to Views and Data
    • Explore AppExchange
    • Explore Tools for enabling application security
    • View access
    • Data access & granularity of Profiles & Permission sets

# Lesson 3: Configure Custom Functionality

It is not uncommon to teach Lessons 3/4 after Lessons 5/6. We feel that this provides a better perspective of the application and reinforces the need to see business problems rather than just the technology nuances. You can also win over non-technical administrators more easily by talking about functionality first.

  1. Workshop: Build Objects and Relationships
    • Create custom objects and establish relationships
    • Create UI
    • Data security
    • Record types revisited
  2. Custom Objects
    • Overview & uptake
    • Standard & custom objects
    • Field types
  3. Enable UI
    • Introduction to OOB UI, Visualforce, Lightning

# Lesson 4: Salesforce Sales Cloud I

  1. Sales Cloud Overview
    • Account & Contact
    • Opportunity
    • Quote
    • Lead
    • Product & Price Book
  2. Workshop: Explore Sales Cloud
  3. Sales Functionality Deep-dive (with Demo)
    • Customer flow within SFDC
    • Accounts and Contacts
    • Campaigns
    • Lead assignment
    • Lead conversion
    • Business automation: Emails, Record types, Assignment rules, Auto-response rules
  4. Workshop: Leads
    • Create campaigns and leads
    • Create email templates and send emails
    • Explore lead conversion process

# Lesson 5: Sales Cloud II

  1. Products and Pricebooks
    • Overview and uptake
  2. Workshop: Explore products and pricebooks
    • Create Products
    • Create standard pricelists and custom pricelists
    • Validate how pricing is influenced
  3. Opportunity Overview
    • Opportunity attributes and products
    • Opportunity stage
  4. Quotes
    • Quote templates
    • Quote creation and distribution
    • Pricing and currencies
    • Approval flows
  5. Workshop: Opportunities, Quotes
    • Currency admin
    • Opportunity creation and approval
    • Approval flows

# Lesson 6: Deep-dive Business Layer

  1. Overview & Demo-driven lessons for Entity Relationships
    • Standard objects and custom objects
    • Relationships: Lookup, Master Detail, Indirect Lookup & External Lookup
    • Relationships: Many-to-Many, Hierarchical, Self
  2. Workshop: Relationships
    • Implement all relationships
    • Explore & create ERDs
  3. Business rules validation & automation: Validation rules, Workflow rules, Roll-up summary fields
  4. Workshop: Explore Business Rules

# Lesson 7: Deep-dive UI Layer I

  1. Demo-driven lessons: User Interfaces
    • Introduction to OOB UI - Classic & Lightning, Visualforce
    • Page Layouts
    • Detail and List Views
    • Hide and show related lists
    • Filters for parent and related lists
  2. Business logic and automation in UI
    • Logic driven by Record Types
  3. Workshop: User interfaces

# Lesson 8: Deep-dive UI Layer II

  1. Demo-driven lessons: User Interfaces
    • Buttons, Quick actions
    • Introduction to advanced customization
    • Introduction to Salesforce mobile concepts
    • Reports: Type, Format, Filters, Conditional Highlighting
    • Reports: Summary
    • Dashboards: Sources, Charts, Schedule
  2. Workshop: Reports and Dashboards

# Lesson 9: Service Cloud

  1. Service cloud
    • Overview and uptake
    • Case management
  2. Solution management
  3. Knowledge management
  4. Demo-driven Lessons: Explore Service app
  5. Workshop: Explore Service app
  6. Business Rule Validation and Automation
    • Email to case, web to case
    • Assignment rules
    • Auto-response rules
    • Escalation rules
  7. Workshop: Explore validation and automation rules

# Lesson 10: Data Management

  1. Data Export
  2. Data Import
    • Inserts, Updates and Deletes
  3. Process for Bulk Data Operations
    • Mass data change impact assessment
    • Testing
  4. Brief Introduction to Third-party Tools for Integration and Data Management
  5. Workshop: Explore Bulk Data Operations

# Lesson 11: TRUST: Security Revisited I

  1. Profiles, Permission Sets, OWD
  2. UI Security
    • App and view access
  3. Data Security
    • Roles
    • Permissions
    • Audit trail
  4. Sharing rules
    • Objects
    • Files
    • Reports & Dashboards
    • Apex
    • Visualforce
  5. Transaction Security
  6. Workshop: Visibility and Sharing I

# Lesson 12: TRUST: Security Revisited II

  1. Demo-driven Lessons: Application security
    • Login policies & restrictions
    • Password policies & changes
    • Session management
    • Certificates
    • Remote settings
  2. Application Monitoring
    • Setup Audit Trail
    • Debug logs and email logs
    • Schedule jobs
    • Batch data load jobs
  3. Demo-driven Lessons: Admin Privileges & Tasks
    • Delegation
    • Deployment: Change sets
    • Desktop and mobile admin: Mobile app, Outlook
    • Introduction to developer tools and ecosystem
  4. Workshop: Visibility and Sharing II
    • Explore application security
    • Create change sets and explore deployment

# Lesson 13: Collaboration on Salesforce

  1. Chatter Overview
  2. Demo-driven Lessons: Chatter
    • Enable Chatter
    • Chatter groups
    • Setup feeds
    • Share data on Chatter
    • Chatter emails
  3. Workshop: Explore Chatter
  4. Communities
    • Overview
    • Branding & user preferences
    • Community management
    • User management
    • Topic management
  5. Ideas
  6. Content Library
  7. Workshop: Collaboration
    • Community Cloud & Management
    • Ideas
    • Content library
    • Communities

# Lesson 14: Rest of the Ecosystem

This section is focused on imparting knowledge of systems that are part of Salesforce ecosystem but may not be of primary interest to a Salesforce application administrator.

  1. Salesforce Support
    • Help and Training
    • Support - Salesforce, AppExchange Partners
    • Issues and Ideas
    • TRUST site
  2. Other applications of interest
    • Marketing cloud
    • Heroku
    • Quip
    • Mulesoft
  3. Q&A
  4. Exam Prep
    • Mindset
    • Study of Scenarios & Questions
    • Multiple choice questions

# Lesson 15: Conclude Workshops and Introduce Case Studies

  1. Complete Any Pending Work from Applied Learning Workshops
  2. Workshop: Structure of admin certification exam & sample questions
  3. Introduce Case Studies
  4. Q & A

# Lesson 16 - 20: Case Studies

  1. Solve case studies
  2. Practice exams

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