This is undeniably one of my favorite Salesforce exams so far. The exam had a perfect mix of easy, moderately difficult and tricky/hard questions. I was surprised to see a few code snippets in the exam but the related questions weren’t that tough. If you have worked enough with Profiles, Roles, OWD, Sharing Rules, Salesforce licenses, Permission Sets, Apex Managed Sharing, Record Locking related issues, Territory Management, Communities, Account & Opportunity Teams, this exam would be easy to crack.
Even though the official page for this certification exam mentions 60 multiple choice questions, I had 65 on my exam and I am not sure why that happened. The passing score is 68% and you get 120 minutes to complete the exam. Here is the Credential Overview which is also available on the official Salesforce certification website:
————————————————————————————————————————————————————-
The Salesforce Certified Sharing and Visibility Designer credential is designed for those who assess the architecture environment and requirements and design sound, scalable, and high-performing technical solutions on the Force.com platform that meet sharing and visibility security requirements. Candidates should have experience communicating solutions and design trade-offs to businesses and IT stakeholders.
The Salesforce Certified Sharing and Visibility Designer candidate has the experience, skills, knowledge, and ability to:
- Describe the usage and implementation of sharing rules, both criteria based and ownership based
- Architect the appropriate object relationships given a scenario
- Articulate how Org-Wide defaults may impact a security model
- Articulate how different Salesforce license types may impact a security & sharing model
- Describe how the Role Hierarchy may impact the decisions made when designing a security model
- Describe how Profile configuration may impact a security and sharing model
- Describe the fundamental concepts around role hierarchy, apex sharing etc. to different levels of audience
- Articulate different security capabilities with respect to record visibility, CRUD based security, record level access and the differences between the three
- Describe the limits of declarative capabilities and when a more custom security solution is required with associated risks and limitations
- Articulate what Apex Sharing is and when it should be used
- Articulate the security implications of using Dashboards, Apex run as an Administrator, VisualForce pages or other “run in context” tools to expose aggregate data
- Identify and mitigate performance and scalability concerns for a recommended solution
- Develop a test process to validate a security model
- Articulate use cases for complex sharing such as territory management or account teams should be used
A candidate for this exam will likely need assistance with the following:
- Designing and implement a tokenization strategy
- Identifying off platform data security considerations
- Determining non-core platform data security considerations (eg. Appexchange) and other
- Salesforce products (eg. Heroku)
- Describing how specific security constructs work (eg. SSL, RSA)
- Identifying common use-cases for requirements gathering
- Determining performance issues and scalability of large data sets with sharing
- Determining what types of sharing are impacted in an LDV scenario
- Determining security requirements around certain kinds of data: PCI, PII, HIPPA, etc.
- Articulating security concepts such as Least Privilege, Defense in Depth, and Failure Securely
- Implementing project and development lifecycle methodologies
- Defining identity management and SSO architecture
————————————————————————————————————————————————————-
Here are the most important topics that you must be well versed with to pass the exam:
- Granular Locking and Deferred Sharing Rule Recalculation
- Territory Model State
- Record Locking error and Resolution
- Object Relationships and their impact on security/onwership
- Salesforce Shield toolkit
- Group Maintenance Tables
- Enforcing object level and field level security in Visualforce
- OWD, Sharing Rules and Role hierarchy
- Profiles and Permission Sets
- runAs() method and its uses
- Security and Sharing in Customer & Partner Community
- Apex Managed Sharing
- Apex Sharing Reasons
- Troubleshooting or Reviewing Security/Sharing changes
- Account & Opportunity Teams
- Login IP Ranges and Login Hours
- With sharing and Without sharing keywords
- Encrypting sensitive information at rest and in transit
- Cross-site scripting, SOQL Injection, Arbitrary redirects
Those are all the topics based on which you will see questions in the exam and if you have a good hold over them, the exam will be a cakewalk for you. Following resources should come in handy for exam preparation:
Using Apex Managed Sharing to Create Custom Record Sharing Logic
Who Sees What: Data Visibility How To’s
Protect Your Salesforce Data with Shield Platform Encryption
Enterprise Territory Management
Managing Lookup Skew in Salesforce to Avoid Record Lock Exceptions
Google the other topics that I mentioned above and make sure you know them well. Good luck!
