Month: July 2018

 

Recently I passed the  Salesforce Certified Data Architecture and Management Designer  Certification. This certification is on the Architect Path and an interesting one as it’s not only focused on Sales Force product suite but tests overall understanding of system integration and best practices.

In this blog, I wanted to share my experience and preparation strategy. As blog posts and experience of others who have passed the certification really helped me prepare.

What Did I study?

• SalesForce TrailHead

SalesForce Trail Head architect-data-architecture-and-management

This is an excellent place to start, one note  I spent a lot of time going through the videos, which were enlightening and helps in getting a general understanding but from an exam specific perspective, you may not need to go through them in entirety.

• Useful Blogs:
  • Cory Cowgill
  • Always a Blezard
  • Salesforce Memo

• Quizlet :

https://quizlet.com/179198495/salesforce-data-architecture-and-management-designer-flash-cards/

• Resource Guide

resource guides. Specifically the use cases after page 16.

Surprises

I did not expect so much focus on the relationship between objects. These are basic but you need to be very clear on object relationships, Lookup,master-detail, External Id, when to use them, How they behave in terms of record access, record deletion.

I spent a lot of time focusing on the numbers, Rolling limits, SOQL query limits, Batch Job limits, index selection criteria 30 percent for the first million, There were not many actually I think none 🙂 .

Parting Notes

Apart from all the good materials that are already available if I have to highlight top 5 focus area they would be

1.Data Migration considering MDM and Storage needs

2.Field Level Audit Trail and Event Monitoring

3.System Performance for reporting and snapshots

4.Object Relationship and Data Model Design Techniques

5. And surprisingly Time Management-I finished the exam 15 minutes early and did not get a chance to review all my answers.

Recently we had a unique challenge in one of our Marketing Cloud implementation, I am sharing a few of the lesson learned from the journey.

Typically in an email-based subscriber model, the contact key would be the email id and the relationship would be 1: 1 between the contact key and email address.

We, on the other hand, had 8-10 emails per customer. So first things first

• Identifying the Subscriber Key

  The email address cannot be the subscriber key. Neither it can be something which is non-unique. We essentially had two options, getting an external id from the source system which we know is unique or generate a unique id, We went with the propagation of a unique id from the source system.

• I send my email but it defaults to the same email address

  We send 10 emails with 10 different data extensions each filtered with a different email address, so what’s the big problem, The problem is once a subscriber email is sent Marketing cloud puts a default email address for the subscriber and all future sends are using that default email address.

• User Initiated Send with  Data Filter – Not working

• Automation with Filtered Data Extension -Not working

• Journey Builder to the rescue

  This is where we decided to use Journey Builder and used a feature in data settings where a specific email address can be set for a journey which overrides the default subscriber email address.

• By activating the journeys and building few decisions splits and Boolean checks we could get the model working where subscribers would receive emails on multiple addresses.
• The same model should be expandable for Phone Numbers as well.

I will keep you updated on how the model scales up with volume.

In the meantime please feel free to share your thoughts and inputs!