What this book covers
Chapter 1, De-Mystifying Salesforce, involves understanding the core terminology used in the Salesforce space, including the difference between products, clouds, and platforms. This is the first step in your journey. From there, we’ll provide a foundational understanding of the Salesforce Platform on which so much of the solution is built.
Chapter 2, Supporting Your Customers with Service Cloud, gives you an insight into Service Cloud. It is built on the Salesforce Platform and is the heart of your customer service experience. Here we’ll cover Service Cloud’s core functionality and go deeper into the integration options and data model supported by the underlying Salesforce Platform.
Chapter 3, Direct-to-Consumer Selling with B2C Commerce, covers the strengths and limitations, core data model, and integration capabilities of B2C Commerce, which is the enterprise commerce engine used to power thousands of websites through the busiest shopping days of the year.
Chapter 4, Engaging Customers with Marketing Cloud, explores the capabilities, component products, data model, and integration options of Marketing Cloud. You will learn how its core messaging and journeys platform supports marketing and transactional communications across a variety of channels, as well as marketing journey creation and more.
Chapter 5, Know Your Customers with Data Cloud, explores Data Cloud’s core data harmonization, unification, and activation capabilities. It support a single-view of the customer, enriched data insights, advanced audience segmentation, and more. We will cover this new platforms’ key terms, data model and data flow, platform capabilities, integration options, and key platform considerations within an expanded B2C solution.
Chapter 6, Salesforce Ecosystem – Building a Complete Solution, shows how beyond the three pillars of the B2C Solution Architecture in B2C Commerce, Service Cloud, and Marketing Cloud, there are a lot of complimentary products that can round out a solution. This topic is focused on a high-level review of additional Salesforce products and where they have advantages in your solution.
Chapter 7, Role of a Solution Architect, shows that succeeding as a B2C Solution Architect is about much more than technology. You’ll learn how to assemble an appropriate team, how to structure a discovery, organize a project, and what the essential deliverables are for the B2C Solution Architect.
Chapter 8, Integration Architecture Options, pulls together the tools in the suite and teaches you more about both point-to-point and middleware-based integration options. We also review cross-cloud development lifecycles to help structure a team that can deliver on more than one workstream.
Chapter 9, Creating a 360° View of the Customer, shows that the heart of a successful B2C Solution Architecture is a complete and consistent picture of the customer. This means typing together commerce, marketing, service, and other experiences. We also cover what a customer means in each system and how they all relate together.
Chapter 10, Customizing for Common Business Needs, explores how specific business capabilities built on top of an integrated B2C solution help to bring together everything we’ve learned. We explore the Salesforce provided solution kits that serve as a jumping-off point, then customize and extend them for our fictional organization.
Chapter 11, Enterprise Integration Strategies, shows how for larger organizations with multiple brands or geographies around the world, the solution gets more complex. We’ll tackle topics like multiple Salesforce orgs, B2C Commerce realms, and Marketing Cloud Business Units as we explore integration with other enterprise systems.
Chapter 12, Exam Preparation Tools and Techniques, serves as a quick reference for readers on essential topics, study materials, and recommendations for how to get hands-on experience in Salesforce B2C Solution Architect certification.
Chapter 13, Prerequisite Certifications, serves as a guide to the three prerequisite certifications needed before qualifying for the B2C Solution Architect exam. We provide a review of the topics with an emphasis on the recommended order and which sections of this book to review for a refresher.
Chapter 14, Commerce and Integration, covers some essential topics and provides study recommendations for readers interested in B2C Commerce Technical architecture Although the Salesforce B2C Commerce Architect certification is not a prerequisite for the B2C Solution Architect certification, there are a lot of topics that will transfer. This chapter helps you in tackling those topics.
Chapter 15, Certification Scenarios, will conclude this book by bringing it all together with four realistic example scenarios using our fictional Packt Enterprises company. For each scenario, we’ll review possible options, shape a solution, and provide a recommended approach to help build good habits that will transfer to the exam or real life.
