Preparing For The Salesforce ‘Integration Architecture Designer’ Exam

I took this exam today and can confidently claim that this is one of the toughest Salesforce exams that I have experienced so far. I believe it might be because of my limited experience with Integration and it’s quite possible that you find it to be easy if you have worked hands-on with Salesforce and external system integrations for more than an year. My knowledge of integration stems primarily from having worked with a few integration related requirements and attending a couple of Architecture whiteboard sessions during the prior projects.

The exam has 60 multiple-choice questions with a passing score of 68% and you get 90 minutes to complete the exam. Here is the Credential Overview which is also available on the official Salesforce certification website:

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The Salesforce Certified Integration Architecture Designer credential is designed for those who assess the architecture environment and requirements and design sound and scalable technical solutions on the Force.com platform that meet end-to-end integration requirements. Candidates should have experience communicating solutions and design trade-offs to business stakeholders.

Here are some examples of the concepts you should understand to pass the exam:

Held a technical architect role on multiple complex deployments or gained equivalent knowledge through participation and exposure to these types of projects
Thorough understanding of Web Services in general and SOAP and REST specifically; understands the basic workings of HTTP/S
Understand the different Force.com APIs and is able to design solutions using the appropriate API
Understand data migration considerations, design trade-offs, and common ETL tools
Experience with common integration patterns used on the Force.com Platform
Understand patterns/mechanisms to secure integrations such as TLS for HTTP

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Here are the most important topics that you must be well versed with to pass the exam:

Outbound Messaging and its capabilities, limitations
Large Data Volume Migration into Salesforce: Considerations
Lightning Connect and its capabilities
Salesforce Canvas
Duplicate Prevention and De-duplication tools and mechanisms (both off platform and within Salesforce)
Named credentials
External ID: Knowledge based questions
Middleware (lots of questions)
API limits in Salesforce and reasons
Type of Testing to be used in different scenarios
Authentication mechanisms ( CA signed certificates, SSL certificates, Base64 encoding)
Batch API and data load in Salesforce (lots of questions)
Partner WSDL and Enterprise WSDL
SOAP Callouts
Enterprise Service Bus
Types of API’s and capabilities
Chatter REST API
Apex REST Services and its capabilities, limitations
Apex callouts and its capabilities, limitations
Salesforce to Salesforce (lots of questions)
Integration related errors and troubleshooting (lots of questions)