Book Review - Becoming a Salesforce Certified Technical Architect

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 (Disclaimer : I didn’t purchase my copy of this book - I was sent a copy to review by Packt Publishing)

Introduction

Salesforce describes Certified Technical architects as follows:

Salesforce Technical Architects serve as executive-level strategic advisors who focus on business transformation with unrivaled domain expertise in functional, platform and integration architecture. They communicate technical solutions and design tradeoffs effectively to business stakeholders, and provide a delivery framework that ensures quality and success.

Based on that description, it's not surprising that there's a huge amount of interest in becoming one. The path isn't straightforward though, with an awful lot of candidates falling at the last hurdle - the review board. This isn't a new development - in the 12 months after I qualified I heard about two week review board events where all 20 candidates failed.  While that's obviously bad for the candidates, it's also not great for the judges - failing people isn't a fun job, and when you have to do it repeatedly the sessions become a chore. 

One reason people fail is that they haven't got experience of presenting a solution and being judged on it. That has improved with community efforts to come up with example scenarios and run practice review boards. While this is good experience for the day of the board, it's not overly helpful in terms of preparation. And that is where this book comes in.

The Book for When You Book

This is the book you want to buy when you are about to book your review board slot.  It won't turn you into a Technical Architect - you still need the experience and learning - but it will get you ready for the board. First off, it looks at what expertise you need to become CTA - if you don't recognise yourself here and spot gaps, maybe hold off for a little while. It then takes you through the structure of the review board session and gives some useful tactics for how to approach it.

Then there are a bunch of chapters around the various areas that you need to shine at in order to pass the board, with mini-scenarios that are worked through with you. Rather than reading straight through, I'd strongly advice having a go yourself and then compare your solution with the exemplar.If you have a different view, that doesn't mean you are wrong, just make sure you can justify it and your justification stacks up - it's highly likely that you'll be quizzed about the benefits of your approach over the other possible solutions.

The book then finishes off with a couple of full mock scenarios, with example solutions and presentation artefacts and script. Again, look to make the most of this by trying it yourself under exam conditions.

Allow Enough Time

I'm already a CTA so I didn't have to take on each of the scenarios and mocks, but it still took me a couple of months to read through the book in my free time and review it. Don't expect to skim this the night before the board, or to rip through it the weekend before. Set aside enough time to work through it properly and you'll reap the benefit.

The Key Advice

The most important piece of advice in the book, which crops up multiple times, is to own your solution. You've considered all the options and have come up with the best possible solution, so be proud of it when you present, and defend it with everything you have. 

In Summary

You can boost your chances of becoming a CTA with this book. It's as simple as that. Tameem Bahri has done a great job with it.

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Certified Salesforce Platform Developer

(As always with Certification blog posts, please don’t ask for answers or post actual questions in comments etc. Doing so breaches the test taker agreement and devalues the exam for everyone)

Introduction

As a Certified Salesforce Advanced Developer, I was offered the chance to participate in the Platform Developer II Certification in July 2015. Anyone who knows me knows I can’t resist a cert, so I jumped at the chance. 

As is the case for every beta I’ve taken part in, the beta is double the length of the regular exam both in terms of questions (120) and duration (4 hours). The basic premise is that you get more time so that you can give feedback on every question, although the fact that there are twice as many questions means that you have to be keep a close eye on the clock. Personally I take the view that its only worth providing feedback for questions that stand out, for both positive and negative reasons - saying that a question is fine doesn’t really add much or help the certification team.

Preparation

The Study Guides from the Salesforce Certification site give chapter and verse on what you need to skill up on for the exam. I focused on the Visualforce, Apex and Lightning Developer’s Guides, plus a refresher on the latest versions of the metadata and SOAP API. I made sure that I knew the order of execution like the back of my hand and the usual Apex best practice suspects of bulkification, the various aspects of unit tests and asynchronous mechanisms. I also paid special attention to oauth and the mobile SDK. 

The Exam

As always, the exam is proctored, either in person on on-line - I chose the on-line variant as I prefer to do exams from home. For the first time, I had the proctor interrupt the exam to ask me to reposition my camera, which took a few attempts and consumed some time, taking me past the four hours in the end.

What struck me about this exam compared to the original Advanced Developer certification was that it felt like I was reading  less code and evaluating more scenarios based on descriptions. That said, I wouldn’t read too much into this as it could be that the questions I received in the original exam were not overly representative but just happened to skew towards code.

Four hours is a long time to maintain focus, and the bonus of a beta exam is that you don’t receive the results immediately. Instead you have to wait a month or so until all the results and feedback have been assessed and collated. Its also difficult to call, as you don’t know which questions will make the final cut, so questions you found easy to get right might not count, whereas those that you struggled with may count against you.

Results

Obviously I passed or I wouldn’t be drawing attention to the experience with this post! As an existing Advanced Developer, passing Platform Developer II also confers Platform Developer I, so my certs count increases by two. Unfortunately, having achieved the new certs means I have to relinquish my Advanced Developer credential, so the net effect is a increase of one, taking me up to 9 x certified. As the number of certs increases its getting harder to catch them all, especially with the new Marketer credentials.

Final Thoughts

Four hours and 120 questions requires a considerable amount of effort, and wonder how useful the final hour or so actually is to the Salesforce Certification team, both in terms of the feedback (most questions will feel tough by then, due to fatigue if nothing else) and performance (I’d expect more incorrect answers towards the end, again due to fatigue). A better way to run these betas might be to break them up into two exams of two hours/60 questions. Beta candidates would still be required to answer all 120 questions, but not in one solid block. I suggested this as part of my exam feedback, so maybe something will come of this. 

Related Posts

• Pardot Consultant
• Service Cloud Consultant
• Sales Cloud Consultant
• Advanced Developer
• Advanced Developer Q&A
• Advanced Administrator
• Technical Architect
• London Developer Group Technical Architect Talk
• Salesforce Certification
• The Other Side of Certification

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Certified Pardot Consultant

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(Please don’t ask for specifics on the exam questions, as this would breach the test taker agreement and devalue the exam for everyone)

Towards the end of 2014, the Salesforce certification portal gained a new track - Pardot Consultant. As anyone who knows Bob Buzzard knows, certifications are my Everest - I have to take them on because they are there, and this was no different.

In fact, it was pretty different - at BrightGen we have customers that use Pardot, so I have experience of implementations, but its not my primary focus so I needed to do some serious studying to make sure that I’d covered all the bases. As a Salesforce Platinum Partner (and as an MVP) I get access to the Premier Training Catalog, which has around 16 hours of interactive Pardot training, so that was my run up to Christmas taken care of.  There’s also a huge amount of information that is publicly available in the Pardot Knowledgebase.

The exam format will be familiar to anyone that has taken a Salesforce certification before, accessed via webassessor with 60 multiple choice questions.  The exam is 90 minutes and the pass mark is 70%, which is a little tougher than the sales/service cloud exams which are 105 minutes with a 68% passing mark.

One area where the exam felt different to the others that I’ve taken (apart from Technical Architect) was the detailed reference information that I had to know - its not just a matter of knowing the concepts or features of Pardot, My thinking is that this is because Pardot is an application rather than a platform (unlike Salesforce) which reduces the breadth of the exam and this is countered with increased depth.  I know this isn’t the greatest explanation, but if I go into details I’ll be giving away information about the specifics of the exam, which would breach the test takers agreement.

The study guide is spot on in terms of the areas that you need to cover, and here’s a few more tips from my experience:

• Pardot has a large number of connectors available, and you should know how to setup and use each of these in detail
• It also has a large number of completion/page actions - you’ll need to understand the purpose of each of these, when they execute, and identify the appropriate setup for specific scenarios
• Knowing Pardot is not enough - much like the Sales and Service cloud exams you need industry knowledge around the certification, in this case marketing automation strategies, targets and metrics.

The other key piece of advice I’d give is to make sure that you read the question thoroughly - when I reviewed my exam prior to submission I found that I’d completely misunderstood two or three questions and picked the opposite answer to the one that was (I believe) correct.  

I put more time into studying for this exam than any others apart from Advanced Developer and Technical Architect, but it was worth it as on 30th December I gained the Pardot Consultant certification and am once again Salesforce Certified Everything.

Related Posts

• Salesforce Certified Technical Architect
• Salesforce Certified Advanced Developer
• Salesforce Certified Sales Cloud Consultant
• Salesforce Certified Service Cloud Consultant
• Salesforce Certification
• The Other Side of Certification

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London Salesforce Developers February Meetup

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The February London Salesforce Developers Meetup took place this week, with 30+ people (Kingmakers!) attending. While the usual suspects were in attendance, there were quite a few new faces, which bodes well for the group.

John Stevenson gave an update on the events that are being run for the community - I can definitely say that the Git and Github Kickstarter Workshops are popular, as every time I receive a notification that one is available, by the time I click through to the details its full!

John Mahoney gave a demonstration of the steroid component library - I didn't get to see as much of this as I'd have liked to, as I was advising someone on customer portal setup in the corridor!

And in a startling development, which nobody could have predicted, I gave a short talk on Salesforce Certification!  As I served as a judge on the EMEA Technical Architect Review Board in January, I'm in a tricky position when talking about this certification. I've spent the last year trying to spread the word of how to pass the board, but that's clearly no longer appropriate. I was therefore fortunate to be joined by my colleague, and newly Certified Technical Architect, Chris Eales (@theEalesie), who talked about his experience and gave advice on how to prepare for the board, plus details of the mechanics of the process.  

The slide deck for this talk can be accessed here. (On a related note, I've added a Salesforce Certfication page to this site that contains links to all my certification related posts - you can access this from the right hand sidebar).

The meetups take place every month and include beer, pizza and plenty of time for networking.  If you haven't made one yet, we'd love to see you. Make sure to join the Meetup group to get notified of all upcoming events.
 

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The Other Side of Certification

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As regular readers of this blog will know, I'm a big fan of Salesforce certification (in fact, I'll be talking about this in my Dreamforce 12 Community Commons session in September).  Recently my eyes have been opened to the other side of certification.

Over the last few weeks I've been helping out with the beta for the Salesforce Service Cloud certification.  While I've had plenty of experience of these exams from a candidate perspective, this is the first time I've been able to contribute back to the exams, and its been a real eye opener.

What has surprised me most is the amount of time that is involved - I've personally spent a number of days on this, and there are quite a few of people involved.  The effort that goes into ensuring the exam is accurate, worded appropriately and at the correct level is quite frankly staggering and way more than I was expecting at the outset.

As I've mentioned in an earlier blog post, the service cloud exam had to be withdrawn due to reports of questions and answers being publicly available.  While this was irritating for potential candidates, the impact on those involved with producing the exams must be orders of magnitude higher.  It isn't like a new exam can simply be churned out in a semi-automatic fashion by a dedicated team, rather these are created by subject matter experts from Salesforce and the wider community who all have day jobs and have to make time to do this.  Even more reason, if it were needed, not to capture questions and ruin it for everyone. Up to now, I've admonished people requesting questions and answers fairly mildly and tried to encourage the askee to make the effort to learn.  No more - now that I've seen first hand the effort that goes into these, any requests of this nature will be dealt with human torch style - flame on!

So next time you are taking one of the exams and feel like the questions are intentionally trying to confuse or trick you, keep in mind that nothing could be further from the truth.  They've been put together by a group of human beings trying their level best and in many cases doing it for nothing with the best interests of the Salesforce community at heart.  This is also something to bear in mind if you are tempted to capture and share the questions and answers.

If you are going to Dreamforce 12, you'll find the members of the certification team in the campground. If you are a certified professional, why not take the time to visit and maybe tell them how much you appreciate their hard work over what must have been a very difficult year - but for them, you wouldn't have any exams to take in the first place. I'll certainly be doing that - maybe I'll see you there.

Salesforce Certification

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In one of my earlier blog posts in April, I set up a mobile application that allowed readers to take a survey on their phone.  At the time I said that I might even take notice of the responses, and I've written this post because I decided I would!  Big thanks to those that tried the app out and gave me feedback.

One area that cropped up a few times was Salesforce certification, and this is also an topic that has garnered a lot of interest when I've blogged or tweeted about it in the past.

Why Get Certified

There are many good reasons to get certified.  A few that I'm aware of are as follows:

• Enhance your career prospects One of the ways in which Salesforce Cloud Alliance partners are measured is on the number and type of certifications their staff hold, and as the partner level increases through Silver, Gold to Platinum, the number and types of certifications required increases.  For example, Platinum Partners are required to have at least one Technical Architect on staff (which is why I had to complete this exam at pretty short notice at the beginning of the year!).  
  Thus having the appropriate certifications will definitely make you a more interesting candidate and most partners that I am aware of seem to be permanently recruiting these days.  Here at BrightGen, we are always interested in the right people.

• Gain Credibility with Customers In my experience, while this isn't something that customers are particularly aware of initially, it is generally well received when you list your certifications and explain the study and effort that you've had to put in to gain them, and your opinion carries more weight.  Obviously this can vary - for example, one prospect didn't seem to be particularly excited about my extensive list of certifications, but when they handed me their business card, mentioning a PhD and membership of a number of chartered institutes, I began to understand why.

• Validation Its a great feeling when you see the "Congratulations" message after submitting the exam. Moreover, you have demonstrated the appropriate level of knowledge and ability to earn that certification, which means that you must know something about it!  You can take comfort from that when you find yourself struggling or doubting your decisions.

• Special Events This is something specific to partners rather than all certified professionals so doesn't apply to everyone.  Events such as Spark the Social Enterprise give excellent opportunities to network with your peers and gain access to key Salesforce experts.  

• Because its there This was the motivation for me for the advanced admin and advanced developer exams.  Once I'd got those that were required from partnership perspective, I decided that I didn't want to stop until I'd got them all.  As I had the original Consultant certification which was discontinued in March 2012, I heaped additional pressure on myself to get all eight while that was still possible.

Resources

There’s a wealth of information on the internet regarding Salesforce Certification.  As is usually the case with these things, not all of it is useful!  My favourites are:

• Salesforce.com Certification Facebook Page
  This is where the latest news will break regarding assignment windows and exam status.  They also have regular ‘office hours’ Q&A sessions with their certified experts, which can have really useful information.
• LinkedIn
  There are a number of useful study and discussion groups on LinkedIn.  The Salesforce.com Certification team also post information and respond to questions, so its well worth following them.
• Force Certified
  The grandaddy of them all.  Great work by John Coppedge.

Studying

The starting point for me with any exam is the Study Guide.  This gives you details of the purpose and format of the exam, and then a point by point summary of the areas that you will be tested on and how much they count towards the overall mark.  

What happens next really depends on how you like to study - if you find videos the best way, the premier online training catalog has great material, including knowledge check questions throughout to see if any of it is sticking.  If you don’t have access to that, there’s a huge amount on the Salesforce channel on youtube.  

Personally, I’m a big fan of the written word, so I’ll usually head to the online help and go straight to the Printable Tip Sheets and User Guides section.  This is a collection of short documents that take you through setting up and using various aspects of the system.  Its basically the same information as can be found elsewhere in the help, but each document is standalone and takes you through planning, configuration, rollout and day to day use.  I find that reading through these documents while actually setting up and configuring a developer org really helps things stick in my mind.  I also tend to scribble my own highly distilled notes at the same time, then write these up into a short ‘pass notes’ style document that I use to refresh my memory in the run up to the exam.

The Exam

After all the hard work and studying is done, it’s exam time.  I’ve been taking the online proctored versions since they became available, as I much prefer sitting in my own house to travelling to my nearest testing centre in London.  The slight downside to this is that the setup is all my problem.  Clearing everything out of my study and setting the webcam up always takes longer than I expect, so if you are going this route make sure you allow plenty of time.  Also make sure that your webcam and microphone are working well in advance, so that you don’t find yourself rooting through boxes in the attic for your old microphone 10 minutes before the exam is due to start, which is exactly what happened to me the first time!

For most of the exams, the format is similar - a set number of multiple choice questions to be completed in a time limit.  The number of questions, time limit and passing grade differs, but all three increase as you move up the certification food chain.

Below are my tips when taking the exam:

• Make sure your webcam is set up exactly as required.  I’ve not had any issues with this, but I know people that have and by all accounts it’s pretty annoying and distracting to have the exam freeze and need to call the US.
• Read the question carefully.  Its really easy to miss the “not”, “doesn’t” or “excluding” and thus end up giving the perfect wrong answer.
• If you don’t know the correct answer, try to derive it by excluding the wrong answers.  As Sherlock Holmes said: “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
• If you don’t know the answer and can’t derive it, mark it for review and move on.  A lot of the time it will come to you when you are thinking about another question.  Very occasionally a later question will be asked in such a way that it will guide you towards the correct answer for an earlier question.
• If you have access to a pencil and paper, note down how confident you are in the answer.  Based on the passing grade for the exam, it gives a good indication of the pass/fail likelihood.  If you’ve got a high level of confidence in most of the answers, you don’t need to sweat that there are a couple of guesses in there.  Of course the reverse is also true - if they are all guesses its going to be a bumpy ride.
  I give mine a percentage rating:
• 100% - definitely correct, in my mind anyway
• 75% - pretty sure it’s correct, but wouldn’t hurt to check later
• 50% - I’ve narrowed it down to a couple, one of which is definitely the answer
• 25% - one sounds more plausible than the others
• 0% - total guess

Share the Love

After you’ve taken the exam, share your experience with the wider community.  Even if you didn’t pass, you may be able to serve as an example for others!

Once you have your certification, you may become the subject matter expert for that area within your company.  Organize some presentations or study group sessions to pass on your knowledge to your colleagues.  This is something I’ve done a fair bit of at BrightGen, and it really works.  Start out with a general heads up about the topic, then capture feedback at the end of each session about what the attendees would like to cover next time and before long you’ll have a team of certified experts and a rich library of collateral.

Write a blog post on your certification journey.  Try to put your personal spin on it, rather than just repeating topic areas from the Study Guide. Was it harder or easier than you thought?  Were there areas that cropped up a lot so you really need to know those in depth? How did you prepare for it, and if you did it again would you try a different approach?

Don’t Game the System

Once you start sharing information, you are likely to start receiving requests to share dumps or sample questions.  Don’t.  You’ve put all that hard work into it, why should someone else get an easy ride?

Don’t try to game the system yourself either.  While having the credential might get through the door for a job, you’ll quickly be found out if you haven’t earned it.   I can’t think of anything worse than being presented to a customer as an expert in the field and then being unmasked as a chancer.  The Salesforce community is also tightly knit, so if you do this the word is likely to spread.

The Sales and Service cloud certifications were withdrawn in April 2012 and have just returned to beta, due to reports of the question and answer set being publicly available.  This is a poster child for the damage that gaming the system can do. Many innocent parties who studied hard for the exam suddenly had their booking cancelled due to a few guilty ones who wanted to cheat their way to success.  In some ways this can be viewed as a backhanded compliment - if the credential wasn’t worth having, people would be trying to cheat their way through, and if it was easy to achieve they wouldn’t need to cheat.

Cloudstock Slide Deck

I had this blog post written a few weeks ago, but then an opportunity to present at Cloudstock came up so it had to go on hold so that I didn't pre-empt my talk. My slide deck from that session is available for download here.

Cloudstock London 2012

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In an unexpected turn of events, I'm going to be presenting a community session at Cloudstock London 2012.  Unexpected as I hadn't planned on this, but a slot came open at the last minute and I agreed to fill in.

The upside to this is that I didn't have much time to think about what I was committing to.  The downside was that I had to decide on my topic and produce a description in a few hours.  What to speak about then?   It had to be something I was familiar with that wouldn't take a huge amount of time to prepare, as Cloudstock was just over a week away.  Looking at the list of existing community sessions, there was a theme of deep dives into specific technical areas - @wesnolte on Javascript Remoting and MVC Frameworks for example, or @pbatisson on Advanced Force.com Testing Techniques.

It struck me that there was an opportunity here to reach those attendees with little or no experience of Force.com, or those with some experience looking to progress.  There was already a breakout session introducing the Force.com platform, so there was little point in a session with the same technical angle.  Therefore I decided to look at this from a different perspective, and cover starting out as a Force.com developer, what employers are looking for and career progression.

This seemed like a good starting point, but unlikely to fill a 30 minute session unless I spoke very slowly! As followers of this blog know, if there's one thing I'm pretty familiar with that's Salesforce.com Certification. Most Salesforce/Force.com careers will involve gaining certifications - its certainly a key metric for Cloud Alliance Partners - so I'll be talking about the benefits, what the exams involve and how to prepare.  Since I gained the Technical Architect accreditation I've had a lot of interest in the exam, particularly the Review Board, so I'll be covering that too and expecting questions!

So if you are thinking about a job in Force.com development, or looking to gain recognition and advance your career through Certification, join me at Cloudstock from 12:30 to 1pm to find out more.

Salesforce Certified Advanced Administrator

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This week saw the final piece in the Salesforce Certification puzzle, as I gained the Advanced Administrator Certification and now have the full set of 8.  Unfortunately, one of these (the original Consultant Certification) retires at the end of March, so I only have a couple of weeks before the total drops to 7.

As usual, please don’t ask for or post any actual exam questions.  Anything of this nature will be removed immediately.

The exam is 60 question with a time limit of 90 minutes and a pass mark of 67%.  In a refreshing change from the last few exams I’ve taken, the questions tend to be short and snappy and quite a lot of them fit onto a single line.  It was also unusual, in that I can’t remember any other exams where I had to know the difference between the editions, remember the permissions required for actions and identify the menu sections for various configuration items.  Make sure that you read the questions properly - its easy to overlook a ‘not’ or a ‘false’ if you skim read - if you find that there are two valid answers, but the question only requires one, check that you haven’t got the wrong end of the stick.

The study guide is the first port of call when preparing for this exam - everything that came up was mentioned.  Areas that you need know are:

• Privacy (sharing) and security - these come up in every Salesforce Certification exam - if you don’t fully understand this side of things they are all going to be challenging.
• Community setup - Ideas and Answers, along with their data categories.
• Territory management - how it differs from the standard role hierarchy, pre-requisites for enabling
• The various desktop tools - Connect for Office, Outlook Connector, Salesforce for Outlook, Offline Edition, Lotus Notes Connector, Apex Data Loader.
• CRM Content - luckily I’ve trained a few customers on this so I had plenty of resources to fall back on.
• Formula fields - best practice for efficient formulas, the various formula functions
• Buttons and links, overriding standard and creating custom
• Extending the platform using the web services API, Apex and Visualforce.  You don’t need to know the syntax or reference details, more the concepts of when its appropriate to use them and what the pros and cons are.
• Capabilities conferred upon a delegated administrator.
• Forensic investigations - I’d not come across this prior to reading the study guide - another good reason to read it!
• How to author and deploy apex code and applications
• Sorage usage - what does and doesn’t count against storage limits, plus strategies to manage storage effectively.
• Workflow and approvals, how these can be used to automate business processes and where these fit into the order of execution along with triggers, validation rules, assignment rules etc
• What you can and can't do with the page layout editor

I think this exam would be a struggle if you tried to memorise the configuration information as opposed to working with the system for some time.  Salesforce adds more and more functionality with each release, so there it would be a huge amount to remember.  Plus as an Advanced Administrator you will be expected to know the limits of the ‘clicks not code’ approach and how you’d go about customizing and extending via the APIs.  You will also need to know how to investigate problems and suspicious activity.



And finally a word for the blogger editor - this really excelled itself today. The contents of this post were deleted three times, HTML markup randomly embedded into text and continual failures to save.  This made what should have been a simple job extremely painful.

Salesforce Certified Sales Cloud Consultant

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Continuing my quest for certification, I passed the Sales Cloud Consultant exam on 23rd Feb 2012.  After the rigours of the Technical Architect exams, this felt a lot tighter in terms of scope, plus it was nice to actually receive a result at the end, rather than having to wait on tenterhooks for several weeks.

Please don't ask for or post any exam questions/answers, as this is contravenes the test taker agreement that we all sign up to at the beginning of the exam and devalues the certification.

This is a 60 question exam with 105 minutes allowed to complete and a 73% pass mark.  A few tips for the mechanics:

1. Read the question carefully.  This is one of the wordier exams that I can remember, and if you skim read its easy to misunderstand the scenario.  More than once over the years I've caught myself choosing the option that was 100% wrong and only picking this up during a review of the questions.
2. Some of the potential answers are flat out wrong, so even if you aren't sure of the correct answer, it may be possible to eliminate the impossible.  And as Sherlock Holmes said, when you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
3. I find it useful to note down questions that I'm not sure about with a percentage confidence.  This allows me to work out how I'm doing against the pass mark and not feel bad if I've got a couple of total guesses in there!

Areas that are covered are detailed in the study guide available from http://certification.salesforce.com/. The areas that I paid particular attention to were:

• Sharing settings - this comes up on every exam.  Its vital to any implementation so its important to understand the detail regardless of whether you are getting certified or not.
• Person accounts - not only what they add to regular accounts but what they don't, in terms of fields and related lists.
• Account hierarchy - again, its important to understand what setting up a parent/child relationship adds (hint: not very much!)
• Territory Management
• Forecasting.  Simply because there's so many of them now - classic, Winter 12 and customisable.
• Custom fiscal years - mainly around the impact of enabling this.
• Multi-currency and advanced currency management - the impact this has on reports, dashboards and forecasting, plus which is appropriate to use for particular scenarios.
• Opportunities, products, pricebooks and scheduling.
• Salesforce to Salesforce

In order to revise for this exam, I used the Salesforce help and cheat sheets/FAQs available from the only help. Wherever possible I tried thing out in my developer instance.  Some things can't be tried out as they are feature activations, but there's no substitute for doing it rather than reading about it I find.  I also watched a few of the Salesforce training videos, mainly so that I could take the knowledge check at the end of each section.  Other useful resources were the Salesforce Consultant Resource Center and the question and answer deck at Study Blue.

I can't remember any questions on actual configuration of Salesforce, all those which referred to a specific configuration item were regarding the change in behaviour once the system is configured in that way.  Its important to know what business problems the Sales Cloud is solving, as a number of questions present a scenario and ask what Salesforce functionality would be appropriate.  Some questions have multiple valid answers and you are asked to choose the most appropriate - in these cases you need to be thinking about clicks not code, minimising the impact on the desired process, impact on adoption and keeping data on platform. Metrics and analytics questions cropped up fairly regularly too.  Integration and data migration have been an ever present in the exams and this was no exception.  There were a fair few questions around the Software Development Life Cycle too - more than I remember in the old CON201 exam.

When all is said and done though, there's no substitute for consultancy experience.  If you've actually been through the end to end process of gathering requirements, designing and building a solution, validating it internally and externally, setting up integration paths and migrating data from legacy systems, you'll find this quite a straightforward exam. Just remember to brush up on the aspects of implementation that you haven't carried out for a while.