Installing Force.com Migration Toolkit on Mac

In this blogpost, I will provide the steps on how I installed the Force.com Migration Toolkit on my MacBook with MacOS Sierra 10.12.1.

INSTALL ANT ON YOUR MAC

Step 1: If you Mac is not pre-installed with ANT you will need to download it. Go to the Apache website and download the latest tar.gz version as depicted below:

Step 2: Once downloaded, extract the files by double-clicking the downloaded archived file and saving the extracted folder into a path of your choosing. I added it on my user path ~/Users/<user_name>/apache-ant-1.9.7 

Step 3: Add the ANT path to the environment variable so that it can be called from any location in terminal. To do this we need to edit .bash_profile and export the ANT path. First, execute the command below and save the path it will give:

echo $PATH


Then open .bash_profile using the nano terminal text editor by executing the following command:

nano .bash_profile

Create the ANT_HOME variable and append it to the path retrieved earlier using colon:

export ANT_HOME=<location_of_the_extracted_ant_files>
export PATH=/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:$ANT_HOME/bin

The editor should look like below:

Verify that you can call ant by executing ant -v

INSTALL FORCE.COM MIGRATION TOOLKIT

Step 1: Download the toolkit from the salesforce developer website

Step 2: Once downloaded, extract files by double-clicking it

Step 3: Copy ant-salesforce.jar on your ANT lib folder

Thats it! Test if its working using the sample ant script provided from the force.com migration toolkit.

Community Cloud Certification Tips

I decided to take to community cloud certification before the end of this year because I think there are a lot of opportunities in the market right now that requires specialisation on implementing communities. Having been involved in the old customer/partner portal implementations as well as a community implementation 2 years ago when it was still in beta, I felt that this is the best time to take it since the functionality is growing every release.

Anyway, this post is about what I think you should be aware of and take time to review when you take the exam and so that you can pass it.

1. Understand data access using sharing set, sharing group, OWD
2. Opening data access using super user access (for partner and customer community plus licenses)
3. What objects each community license types provides access
4. Difference between Private and Unlisted groups for community collaboration
5. Live agent setup with Communities
6. Setting up multi-language with Communities
7. Providing public access to Communities
8. Benefits of using custom domains for Communities
9. Community limits (# of keyword in a list, # of moderation rule etc)
10. Other specific things such as:
1. What are the available lightning components in Home page
2. Managing recommendations
3. Setting up Community Logo on login page
4. What are the scenario the welcome email will get sent 
5. Which template is Salesforce1 ready 
6. What type of changes can be done on the community page header

Most of the questions are scenario-based that will ask which implementation options are efficient (yes, multiple answers). There are tricky questions that will really test your Salesforce knowledge not just for Community functionalities. 

For some reason, I thought that this certification is the easiest compared to Sales and Service Cloud. I didn't get any question related to community integration like question and answer and escalate-to-case, community rollout process and measuring community success thru reports and dashboard.