I just got home from the testing center here in Chicago and I'm happy to announce that I just passed the Salesforce Certified Administrator Exam (201). I decided to take this exam because its the prerequisite for all the implementation certifications including the Sales Cloud Consultant exam.
If you're already a certified Force.com developer, you'll find there is alot of overlap between the two exams. There were about 10 - 15 questions covering security and sharing rules which overlap between the 201 and 401 exams, which is no surprise since it's fundamental to working with the platform.
The Admin 201 exam had several questions about setting up Sales and Marketing processes, so you should be familiar with those pieces of Salesforce. You also need to know the Setup menu of Salesforce inside and out. How do you setup new users? Where and how can you restrict users login access?
You need to know how Role Hierarchies, Sales Teams, and Account Teams work. There were questions covering Assignment Rules, Escalation Rules for Cases, and how Campaign Members table works (You can assign Contact and Leads to Campaign Members). There are a few reporting questions also for Summary Fields and such.
Overall, not too bad of an exam. I'd recommend anyone who is thinking about it to dive in. If you follow the study guide that is on the certification site of Salesforce.com you should be golden.
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