Salesforce Winter 16 Maintenance exams

Today I passed both of the Winter 16 release certificate maintenance exams - Admin 201 and Developer 401. Actually both of them had almost the same questions so it turned out to be a very quick exercise.

As there is always a question around the morality of sharing the actual questions and answers from a test, I am not going to do that. Instead I will try and share information around what you would need to read to be prepared for the test. Based on my experience, there are just a few topics so I think if you go through these, you will be good.

The main topics I encountered in the test are -

• Improvements released to Chatter posts. 

There are a couple of important improvements around Chatter to note in Winter 16 release. One of them is the ability to mute posts which will help users cut down the amount of posts they see in the Chatter feed. Another one is the ability to use rich text while creating posts.

• Improvements to process builder and visual workflows

Process builder and visual workflows are emerging as a nice and powerful replacement to Apex in most scenarios. There are some good enhancements to both of these powerful features. One is the fact that they have been further bulkified. Another is ability to setup multiple scheduled actions in a process flow. Now administrators can get more notifications on inactive flows as well.

• There are some great user features that have been added such as auto-completion of standard address fields
• Salesforce Files - There are new features that have been added to Salesforce Files capability like the ability to freeze sharing of files, ability to prevent addition of files from Salesforce directly etc. Reading up on this section will be helpful.
• Improvements to Chatter groups - ability to view records which have @Mentions for a group through a related list in the Group screen
• How is Lightning Experience UI enabled and for whom does it get enabled by default?

In terms of where to read about these topics, I found the release notes to be the best reference - Winter 16 release notes . The pdf is large but if you concentrate on the topics I suggested, you should be able to take the test easily.