Tips for passing Salesforce Certified Identity and Access Management Designer

Today (28th Jan'2018), I have successfully passed Salesforce Certified Identity and Access Management Designer (WI18) with an overall score 79% and finally acquired certified System Architect credential.

I have faced total 65 questions. Salesforce has added 5 unscored questions.  It has taken around 90 hours of preparation exactly one month time frame.

Exam Outline

The Salesforce Certified Identity and Access Management Designer exam has the following characteristics:

• Content: 60 multiple-choice/multiple-select questions* (5 unscored questions will be added)
• Time allotted to complete the exam: 120 minutes (time allows for unscored questions)
• Passing Score: 65%
• Registration fee: USD 400, plus applicable taxes as required per local law
• Retake fee: USD 200, plus applicable taxes as required per local law
• Delivery options: Proctored exam delivered onsite at a testing center or in an online proctored environment. Click here for information on scheduling an exam.
• References: No hard-copy or online materials may be referenced during the exam.
• Prerequisite: None

*Please note that as of November 16, 2017, all Salesforce certification exams will contain five additional, randomly placed, unscored questions to gather data on question performance. The duration of each exam has been evaluated and adjusted to accommodate the inclusion of the unscored questions. These five questions will be in addition to the 60 scored questions on your exam, and will have no impact whatsoever on your score.

Preparing myself

As usual before I started my preparation, I have prepared a document and noted down all the points and advice mentioned by these guys. Thanks to all of them.

• Salesforce Certified Identity and Access Management Designer Exam Tips - By Gemma
• PASSING THE SALESFORCE IDENTITY AND ACCESS MANAGEMENT CERTIFICATION - By Chris Whitbread
• Salesforce Technical Architect Certification – Identity and access Management - By Salim Mohamed
• Salesforce Certified Identity and Access Management Designer - By Abrar Ul Haq
• How to study for and PASS the Salesforce Certified Identity and Access Management Designer exam - By Richard N
• Prepare for Salesforce ‘Identity & Access Management Designer’ Exam - By Binod Kumar
• Preparing For The Salesforce ‘Identity and Access Management’ Designer Exam - By Mayank Srivastava

Since this exam is well known as hard exam and didn't have much experience on Identity implementation, so I have changed my mode of preparation.

First one and half week, I have gone through all Salesforce Identity and Access related videos in youtube and taken all the notes on paper. Here are the most valuable videos and surprisingly 50% of the questions I have received from this video content.

• Introduction to SAML - Chalktalk on what is it, how it is used
• Hands-on Training: Enable Single Sign-on with SAML and Salesforce Identity
• Single Sign-On and User Management for Portals and Communities
• Single Sign-On Best Practices
• Customizing User Authentication with Login Flows
• Deploying Single Sign-On and Identity for Employees, Customers, and Partners
• Salesforce Identity: Connecting Employees, Customers, Partners, and Apps
• Identity How-to's

Long back I have completed this trail Secure Identity and Access Management. So, again prepared my two Developer Editions and completed all different types on hands exercises on either referencing the video or trailheads.

Jitendra's blog post Implement SAML based Single Sign On (SSO) | Using Salesforce as Identity Provider (Idp) as well as Service Provider (SP) helped me well in this preparation.

Then, started going through all the links which have mentioned in study guide.

Topics I have received on Exam

• Different types of OAuth scope (at-least 3 questions)
• Diffferent types of OAuth flows (at-least 4 questions)
• SP initiated or IdP initiated flow (at-least 3 questions)
• My Domain configurations and why it is needed (at-least 3 questions)
• Just-in-provisioning (at-least 4 questions)
• Different types of licensing. Specially learn about External Identity License
• Auth Provider
• Different type of certificates and where to find those and how to use those.
• Two Factor authentication: How that can be implemented, Whats the decision to be taken before implementing this.
• Canvas implementation (at-least 3 questions)
• Custom Login flow (along with Two factor authentication) 
• Identity Connect, when and how to use it and whats the benefits.
• Providing access to Customers, Partner and internal employees (7-8 questions).
• Delegated and Federated Authentications: Advantages & what are the considerations to be taken.
• Lot of questions on providing access to the Salesforce Ideas to the non-salesforce users.

Along with my points if anyone follows those above links then anybody can pass this exam.

Good Luck!

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