Interesting in passing the Salesforce Service Cloud Consultant Exam?  Check @jeffdonthemic’s excellent blog: How to Pass the Service Cloud Consultant Exam

Great info as always Jeff!  Cheers,

John

Check out another great community resource for certification: http://www.forceprepare.com/.  Looks like the materials are primarily for Developer and Administrator certs.

Cheers,

John

Much to my dismay, I was unable to attend Dreamforce this year.  I did however get a chance to touch base with a  few folks that did attend a learn a bit more about the upcoming changes to Salesforce certifications.

Verified

The Salesforce Service Cloud Consultant is a new certification and is available today.  You can register for the certification exam at www.webassessor.com.  As soon as I have a chance I’ll be diving into this one!

Unverified

• The Salesforce Certified Consultant exam will be phased out and no longer be offered.
  • It will be replaced with the Salesforce Service Cloud Consultant (available today; see above) and Salesforce Sales Cloud Consultant exams.
    • Salesforce Certified Administrator will become a prerequisite for both above exams.
  • Those of us with existing Consultant Certifications will be able to test for one of the above certifications for free.

Further Speculation

If the above changes are true, I suspect changes to the developer certifications are in order as well.  Perhaps Certified Custom Cloud Consultant or like?  Personally, I think the Developer certification is horribly misleading, as it has very little do with development in the traditional sense.  The distinction between a developer and advanced developer to the outside world is all but lost in my experience.

Did you attend DF?  Did you hear any of the same?  Please keep me in the loop, feel free to comment below!

Cheers,

John

Configuring customer portal can be somewhat confusing the first time around.  Here are a few basic guidelines to get you going in the right direction:

• For each object that you expose in a portal, the sharing model must be private (unless you want to expose all records of that object to your portal).
• Use sharing rules to recreate the sharing model for All Internal Users.
  Example rule creation for accounts:
  
• In order to expose an object and/or tab to the customer portal the following must be true:
  • The tab in question must be supported by the customer portal.  From the article “Why can’t I see my tab in the Customer Portal?”:
    

    Even though all objects are displayed in the Customer Portal setup, only the following can display as tabs in your Customer Portal:
    Home
    Cases
    Solutions
    Web tabs
    Documents
    Custom objects

  • When exposing a custom object, make sure to check ‘Available for Customer Portal’ on the object properties:
    
  • Ensure that the customer portal profile(s) have access to the object:

    • Object Tab Setting: Default On

    • Standard Object Permissions: Object Read (minimum)

    • Field-level security on the object

  • Make sure profile(s) are assigned the correct page layout

  • Create the customer portal:

    • Ensure ‘Login Enabled’ is checked

    • Click Customize Portal Tabs (top) and choose tabs to expose (all of the above must be configured before tabs are exposed)
      

    • Click Edit Profiles button (bottom) and assign profile(s) access to login to the portal
      

  • Add/verify portal management buttons on the account and contact page layouts
    

Self-registration will allow existing contacts within your Salesforce org to sign up for portal access.    To enable:

• Enable self-registration on the portal itself
• Give contacts ability to self-register
  • The field ‘Allow Customer Portal Self-Registration’ determines if a contact can self-register.  By default, this field is not checked.  First, enable visibility:
    • Grant the Visible permission to ‘Allow Customer Portal Self-Registration’ for portal administration profiles
      
    • Add the ‘Allow Customer Portal Self-Registration’ field to the appropriate contact page layouts
  • Update all contacts to grant self-registration capability (this can now be accomplished through data loader as well)
• Contacts should now be able to self-register through the portal login page
  • Note:  The email address provided on the self-registration page must match the email address on the contact record exactly (it IS case sensitive!).

Just for the record, I am not recommending this as a solution.  This decreases the security of your Salesforce org, and is generally against best practices.  If you don’t fully understand the implications I would definitely not recommend this solution.  That said, I saw a client that did exactly this and thought I would share:

Turn off identity confirmation entirely: trust all IP addresses.  This way the connecting IP address is always trusted, and therefore identity confirmation is always bypassed.  Likewise, you will never need a security token for any connection.

This also means that if someone gets a Salesforce username/password combo from any user with API access, they can login and extract your entire database without a security token or email address verification from anywhere in the world.  Use with caution!

Cheers,

John