The Advanced Administrator  Certification is a credential developed for Salesforce professionals who have experience in designing advanced setup and configuration solutions on the Salesforce platform and are looking to verify their expertise. Working experience of the product is important for this certification in particular as it is designed specifically for professionals who can devise a solution for a particular customer scenario.

There are 10 areas of knowledge that are covered by the Salesforce Advanced Administrator certification.

The following are the core topic areas of the Advanced Administrator certification and what you’re expected to know:

Security and Access is the area of knowledge that carries the largest weight, so exam takers should know it well. This includes record access (e.g. organization-wide sharing settings, role hierarchy, sharing rules, and manual sharing) and field-level security. Exam takers need to know custom profiles, permission sets, and delegated administration, and when it is appropriate to use each of them.

Territory management is also included in this section and is appropriate for those organizations that need to base their account record sharing on some characteristics of the account, instead of the usual owner and role hierarchy method of sharing.

When building custom objects, it is often the case that the object needs to be related to another standard, custom, or external object. In this section, exam takers need to know the different types of relationships that can be used to extend custom objects and the considerations related to their usage. In particular, exam takers need to know the 3 types of relationships, master-detail, many to many, and lookup as well as the features and differences between them

As a leveling-up Salesforce administrator, an advanced administrator must be aware of the following key auditing features: setup audit trail, login history, record modification fields, and field history tracking. In terms of monitoring Salesforce processes, an advanced administrator should know the ways to monitor resources (file and data storage) and monitoring scheduled and background jobs.

In this area, exam takers are required to understand how to maintain and customize some features specific to the Sales Cloud such as products, price books, schedules, and quotes. Forecasting features are also tackled here such as forecast categories, hierarchy, and quotas.

This area covers different Service-Cloud-specific features such as service entitlements and processes, and support agent interaction features such as Chat, Case Feed, Service Cloud Console, Experience Cloud sites, and Omni-Channel. Salesforce Knowledge is also an important topic including article record types and data categories.

This covers both improving and enriching data quality, by using manual processes to encourage clean and accurate data to be imported into an org. Data management also involves using reports to validate correct data import and apps from the AppExchange to help prevent and find duplicates. Part of enriching a database is to extend data with external information. This is where an administrator must consider and be aware of using third-party integration apps to enable one system to be the single source of truth and allow seamless data exchange between systems.

Salesforce content is typically used for corporate files such as sales presentations that are delivered or presented to customers. Content allows files to be organized into libraries, allows searching within content, keeps track of document versions, and allows users to subscribe to particular libraries, authors, tags, or individual files to receive notifications when files are added or changed. It is important for exam takers and soon-to-be Advanced Administrators to know how to configure content permissions and file access for end-users.

Change management includes the options for moving metadata e.g. configuration and apex code between environments. The two most important tools that exam takers should focus on are change sets and the basic Salesforce extensions for Visual Studio Code. As certified Administrators, exam takers are expected to understand and know the capabilities and best practices for using change sets.

Reports and Dashboards are also covered in the Administrator certification but in this exam, questions are focused on more complex capabilities of reports and dashboards. Some of the key topics to study are custom report types, reporting snapshots, complex charting, custom summary formulas, bucketing, joined reports, cross filters, dynamic dashboards, dashboard filters.

In this area, exam takers should know the various automation tools available for a solution. These include process builders, flow, formula fields, and approval processes. It is also important for examinees to know how to troubleshoot process automation, especially, approval processes. An individual aiming to be a certified Advanced Administrator must also be aware of when to use programmatic techniques based on given business requirements.