Salesforce Advanced Admin study guide
Salesforce Advanced Admin · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
The Salesforce Certified Platform Administrator II is the advanced-tier credential for Salesforce administrators who have moved beyond day-to-day user maintenance and now design solutions with the platform's more sophisticated tools. Salesforce describes credential holders as seasoned administrators who can harness the power of advanced features and functionality to solve a variety of business problems - meaning the exam tests judgement about which mechanism fits a scenario, not just recall of where a setting lives. The Salesforce Advanced Admin study guide has 7 sections and about 2,289 words.
01Security and Access
Salesforce access is decided in layers: object permissions (from profiles, permission sets, and permission set groups), then field-level security, then record access. Record access is the union of org-wide defaults, the role hierarchy (only when Grant Access Using Hierarchies is enabled on that object), sharing rules, manual sharing, teams, and Apex managed sharing.
356 words, about 2 min02Extending Custom Objects and Applications
Know the relationship family: lookup (loose, optional, no cascade delete, no roll-up), master-detail (tight, required, cascade delete, determines the child owner, supports roll-up summaries, max two per custom object), junction objects for many-to-many, hierarchical (user-to-user only), external lookup (parent matched by an external ID) and indirect lookup (parent matched through another object's external ID). Roll-up summaries exist only on master-detail; cross-object formula fields can climb a limited number of parent hops but can never read child records directly.
309 words, about 2 min03Auditing and Monitoring
Four tools answer most audit questions. Setup Audit Trail records configuration changes - who edited a profile, deployed a change set, changed a sharing rule - for the last 180 days (the page shows the 20 most recent; download for the full history).
342 words, about 2 min04Data Management
Match the tool to volume and object. Data Import Wizard handles up to 50,000 records for a fixed list of objects (accounts, contacts, leads, solutions, campaign members, and more) and gives duplicate-handling options plus simple field mapping.
331 words, about 2 min05Declarative Automation
Know what each tool does and when it fires. Before-save record-triggered flows (like before triggers) change fields on the same record with no extra DML.
321 words, about 2 min06Change Management and Deployment
Change sets move metadata between a sandbox and production over a deployment connection: outbound from the sandbox, inbound to production, with dependencies tracked and missing components flagged. They cannot delete components, cannot carry every metadata type (many settings and data are excluded), and are subject to size and component limits.
295 words, about 1 min07Service and Sales Cloud Applications
Case routing is a chain: Web-to-Case and Email-to-Case create the case, assignment rules pick the owner (only one rule can be active at a time), queues hold unowned work, and escalation rules age cases into new owners or actions. Entitlements , with service contracts and milestones, govern whether a customer is covered and start or stop SLA timers - milestones require Entitlement Management to be enabled.
335 words, about 2 min