Salesforce Admins Podcast

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Alastair Dinning, Senior Solution Architect at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about the process of adding new features to your org, from what to look for when you're reading through release notes to rolling something new out and driving adoption. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Alastair Dinning. Which new features should I pay attention to in the release notes? The exciting thing about working in the Salesforce ecosystem is that it's continually evolving. A new release is always around the corner, chock-full of new features that could improve your org. But how do you sift through everything to figure out what will add value and what's just a shiny new toy? My guest this week is Alastair Dinning, a Senior Solution Architect with Salesforce Professional Services. He has 14 years of experience as a consultant for businesses of all sizes, helping admins change their orgs for the better. For Alastair, the most important thing when you're looking through release notes is to have a clear understanding of your business processes and problems. Do any of these new features address a pain point? Whether you practice SABWA, run a steering committee of power users, or use a case management system for feedback, you need to have your finger on the pulse of your users. Three pathways for adding a new feature to your org Once you've identified a problem you'd like to address, Alastair lays out three options: you can build a declarative solution yourself, you can buy a solution off of the AppExchange, or you can work with a developer to code something custom. Building your own declarative solution means that you end up with something that's tailored exactly to your specific business requirements, but it also costs you resources in terms of time. Buying something off the AppExchange, on the other hand, costs you money up front, but you're saving a lot of time and can deploy the change quite quickly. Even if the solution isn't 100% right for your specific problem, Alastair encourages you to reach out to the AppExchange partner because they're often willing to make improvements. Finally, coding a custom solution is probably the most expensive in terms of internal resources, but gets you exactly what you want. The drawback here is flexibility. You don't want to end up with a solution that you can't update if your business context changes in the future. Know when to keep Salesforce steady for your users If you've spent time with your users and really understand their pain points, adoption should come easily. But at the end of the day, the job of the admin isn't to constantly roll out new features—it's to make life easier for your users. Sometimes, the best thing you can do is to keep your Salesforce environment consistent and stable. That means not only identifying which new features could possibly be helpful for your org, but having proactive conversations with leadership about the bigger picture.  Make sure to listen to my full conversation with Alastair for more about how to roll out new features to your org and how admins can best work with consultants. And remember to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode. Podcast swag Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store Learn more Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: September Monthly Retro: What Changed, What Matters, and What Admins Should Do Next Admin Trailblazers Group Admin Trailblazers Community Group Social Alastair on LinkedIn Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn Salesforce Admins on X Mike on Bluesky social Mike on Threads Mike on X Full show transcript Mike: This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, I'm talking with Alastair Dinning, a senior solution architect with Salesforce Professional Services about how admins can decide if a feature is right for their org. We're going to dig into how to spot the business problem behind a feature, when to click, buy, or code your solution, how to prototype before making a big investment, and why timing and support ability matter just as much as functionality. So next time you find yourself reading the release notes and thinking, "Oh, that looks cool," you'll have a framework for deciding when to implement it. With that, let's get Alastair on the podcast. So Alistair, welcome to the podcast. Alistair Dinning: Thank you, Mike. It's good to be here. Mike: We connected ironically over Slack. Not ironic. Is it ironic? I always get hung up because I'm afraid I say ironic because I learned irony from Alanis Morissette, but we connected over Slack because you're a fan of the podcast and you work at Salesforce. And I was like, "Hey, I have this topic that I think you're perfect for." So let's start off by you letting everybody know what you do at Salesforce and how you got there. Alistair Dinning: So I am a senior solution architect with Salesforce Professional Services. I've been at Salesforce for give or take five years. I've been working in the ecosystem for 13 and my entire career has been as a declarative consultant and into being in the architect world. And I came to Salesforce through the acquisition attraction on demand and having spent my whole career, my Salesforce career in Salesforce consulting. So I've worked with a good number of organizations, whether they be small business, medium business, large business, government. I'm working currently with the Canadian federal government. I've worked with education, with nonprofit. And I mean, as a consultant, that's my approach to this job. And it's like, how do we as admins do things declaratively and do things well? And what can we bring to the table? Mike: Yeah. Wow. Worked with government. You must have a lot of scissors to cut all the red tape. Alistair Dinning: Yeah, government does bring a lot of red tape with it, but you make sense when you're talking about taxpayers' money. Mike: Yeah, no. I mean, it's all intentional for a reason. So let's talk... One of the biggest questions I always get, and it's a question I had as a Salesforce admin, which is how do I decide if this feature is right for my org? And feature could be anywhere from the biggest feature do we flip on? At one time we had customers had a choice of turning on lightning all the way down to the smallest little checkbox that maybe we added. And I was reading through some of the stuff that you do at Salesforce and I thought it'd be great to have that conversation with you about helping admins figure out if a feature is right and maybe give them some of your thought process into that. So I think that's where we'll start. Alistair Dinning: Absolutely. So one of the fun things about Salesforce that I've always appreciated is the three releases a year and the fact that we get new functionality every four months or so, and there's always something that's in those release notes that's exciting. And again, the advantage of having been a consultant is I've seen all of these different organizations and I see these new tools coming from the release notes and I'm like, "Oh, that's cool. That's really fun, and I think that's going to add value." But to your question, is it just this shiny new toy or is it actually going to add some real value into the solution? I think I always start with, "Okay, so that looks cool, but how is the business going to utilize it?" From two points, either is there a business value that we can add with this new feature or is there a pain point that I as an admin have seen, I've heard from my users time and time and time again where they're all like, "I don't like this. I don't like this. This is a slow process. This is in my way," boom, boom, boom. And does this new feature address that pain point? So if I was to take Dynamic orms in the Lightning Page Builder, they're super cool because we could do all sorts of fun things with it. But it's only useful if, for example, the business say to me, "Hey, my page layout is completely cluttered with all this stuff that I don't use at the beginning of a opportunity process. So why do I have deep fields on or a whole ton of fields on opportunity development when really we're just trying to identify what the opportunity value might be, value prop might be for this customer?" Mike: I think that's a great start. And I know I thought of that. I'll say this, I would really love it if the business was as explicit as you say they are like, "Oh, there's really this problem with too many fields." I think oftentimes you have to peel back a layer and listen to users say, "I'm just struggling to find the right information on this page." Or I remember when I was an admin, we brought on a different business unit and I remember the business unit asking why there was this entire section of the account page and it was kind of in the middle and it was above all of the information that they needed. And I said, "Well, if you don't like it, you can just collapse that section." And they said, "Yeah, but shouldn't it know whether or not it should show that to me?" And this was before Dynamic Pages. And so I bring that up to say, I hear you. I wish it was that explicit, but sometimes you almost have to listen and put two and two together for them. Alistair Dinning: That's right. It can be hard for the business to know how to articulate what they want from the solution. But as an admin, there are a couple of tools you've got. One is you could spend some time desk side with your key users or have a steering committee of users who are giving you feedback on a regular basis on what they're using, what they like, what they don't like. The other option is that if you have an ITSM light solution where you've got case management, so your users are providing functionality cases or technical cases on Salesforce, on their usage of Salesforce, then you can actually scroll through the data and see what people are saying, "This works

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Joshua Birk, Senior Director of Admin Evangelism, and Kate Lessard, Lead Admin Evangelist at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about what caught our attention at Dreamforce, what surprised us, and what's worth spending time on. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Joshua Birk and Kate Lessard. Build fast and accurately with Builder Central Probably the most exciting announcement from the keynote is Builder Central. It's a low and no-code workspace to enable admins to build fast and accurately, without compromising on security. From React sites to flows to agents, you can get an idea off the ground with plain language prompts. But just because you move fast doesn't mean you need to break things, thanks to automated testing, safety checks, and built-in controls. "We can take what we as admins already know about data models and our org structure and really, truly define what we're building," Kate says. You can upload requirements documents and information about your organization's business processes to make sure everything that you build works from the get-go. Create consistently amazing Salesforce experiences The other thing that was touched on in the keynote was Headless 360 and the Headless Experience Layer. You can bring Salesforce to Slack, Claude, and anywhere else your users need to interact with your data. If you're feeling overwhelmed by how many different ways there are for users to interact with your Salesforce data, know that you're not alone. But at the end of the day, these are experiences that you're designing for your users to make their lives easier where they're already working. Admins need to focus on governance and security Finally, the biggest takeaway from Dreamforce this year is that governance and trust are more important than ever. Hackers use AI too, and the threat landscape is constantly evolving. Now more than ever, the role of the Salesforce Admin has shifted into governance. That means data cleanup and strict permissions controls to make sure that your agents are working as intended. And that also means getting a better handle on how your data is moving across platforms and who might have access to it.  Trust is a core principle at Salesforce, and so we're rolling out new tools like Security Center Essentials and the Transaction Security Policy Accelerator to help you take control of what's going on in your org. There's so much more great stuff in our September Monthly Retro recap of Dreamforce, so make sure to listen to the full episode. And don't forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us in your feed every Thursday. Podcast swag Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store Learn more Salesforce Admins Blog Post: Dreamforce 2026 Product Highlights for Admins Salesforce 360 Blog Post: Introducing Builder Central: The No Code AI Workspace for Salesforce Salesforce Platform Guide: Your Guide to the Headless Toolkit: Bring Salesforce Anywhere Humans and Agents Work Salesforce 360 Blog Post: Deploy Best-Practice Security Policies Instantly with Transaction Security Policy Accelerator Admin Trailblazers Group Admin Trailblazers Community Group Social Josh on LinkedIn Kate on LinkedIn Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn Salesforce Admins on X Mike on Bluesky social Mike on Threads Mike on X Full show transcript Mike Gerholdt: Before we jump into today's conversation, I want to give you a quick heads up about what's coming on the Salesforce Admins Podcast. Starting in October, we're moving to two episodes a month with a little bonus episode to kick things off. So October 1st, we're talking about how do I decide if a new Salesforce feature belongs in my org? Because Salesforce just released it and we should turn it on, are two very different things. Then on October 15th, Jennifer Lee joins me for a special video and audio episode, Winter '27, What Admins Should Check Before Their Org Updates. We'll help you figure out what deserves your attention, what you should test, and what you need to be ready for before the release hits your org. And then on October 29th, we're asking the question, what does an admin certification prove in the Agentforce era? We'll look at what certification tells employers and admins today and where hands-on experience and judgment fit into that picture. So after October, you can expect two episodes a month focused on helping you understand what matters, why it matters to your work, and what you can actually do with it when you get back to your organization. And that brings us to today's episode. So I'm joined by Kate Lessard and Josh Birk for a post Dreamforce conversation about what caught our attention, what surprised us, and more importantly, what's actually worth an admin spending time on. We're going to talk about Builder Central and what it could change about how admins build, new ways Salesforce can show up in tools like Slack and Claude, and why that data permissions and security in your org are even more important. We'll also get into Security Center Essentials, transaction security policy accelerators, Agentforce vibes, and some of the new tools that can help admins understand and work with their org faster. But there's a bigger thread running through all of it. AI can help you build, investigate, and move faster, but it doesn't replace knowing your business or knowing when something is actually right for your org. Josh calls it trust but verify. And I think that's a pretty good way to head into this conversation. So let's get Kate and Josh on the podcast. So Josh and Kate, welcome to the podcast. Joshua Birk: Thanks for having us, Mike. Kate Lessard: Thanks. Mike Gerholdt: We all have a little post Dreamforce voice in our step because it's been a long few days, but I wanted to get something together with all of us really fresh right after we landed. Some of us landed sooner rather than later leaving San Francisco and talk about what we saw, what really stuck out to us, maybe some of the demos we got to work on and things that surprised us. So Kate, you are in the keynote and keynotes always get top billing, so we're going to start with you. Kate Lessard: Woo, I love it. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. Talk to me about some of the stuff that you guys showed in the keynote for people that missed it and what you're excited for. Kate Lessard: Yeah, the keynote this year was really fun to work on the demos because there's just some really exciting new technology out there for admins to leverage. I think that there are just a lot of exciting new features that are specifically for admins that are really designed to improve our building experience. And if you are able to catch any of the sneak peaks or any roadmap sessions, you know that there are even more coming. But if you did join us for the keynote or if you plan to go watch it later, a really great example is Builder Central. And this is an amazing AI builder that is specifically designed for low-code and no-code builders. So not only can we use it to build fast and accurately, but we can also use it to edit directly in the Explorer, which is I think my favorite feature. And we can really visualize everything that we build and that spans from things like react sites to flows to agents, and then even all the way over to data model and permissions, which is super cool as an admin. And I want to say that I think that the most important thing to note though as an admin is that using tools like this, my expertise and my strong foundational skills that I've developed are still really necessary. With Builder Central, we have the ability to add things like requirements, documents, or information about the different business processes from our organization so that we can take what we as admins already know about data model and our org structure and really truly define what we're building. And so I think to me, the message and the excitement here is that as admins, we still need to understand the business and the technology to be successful and that doesn't go away, but using a fantastic product like Builder Central, we're more important than ever and we get to create these exceptional experiences and that really has lit me up this Dreamforce. Mike Gerholdt: I'm going to pause you there because I know you've got more to talk about. Kate Lessard: Oh, yeah. Mike Gerholdt: I'm so glad you brought up Builder Central first. I was floored. So I had seen, obviously we work on stuff prior to seeing it at Dreamforce and I'd seen demos and I think maybe it just kind of skipped off the surface for me as, "Oh, it's another AI thing and it can do this." And it kind of looked like a little bit of setup with Agentforce or Agentforce for setup. And I gave it some credibility, but I didn't really understand what I was looking at. And then I got on the show floor and this was Thursday and Daivat, who works for Tiaan, who was in the keynote, pulled me aside and said, "Mike, you got to come to our demo booth." And I'm like, "Okay." And he showed me a customer that came up and was really into Star Trek and this is why I'm like, "Okay," took a screenshot of a Star Trek set, kind of like those glittery panels that 70s, 60s tech ad. And he said, I think I want to make a dashboard for my executives because they're really into Star Trek. And they gave Builder Central that screenshot and the data it should pull and it created a dashboard, I kid you not, that looked just like Gene Roddenberry had created it for the 1960s Star Trek episodes. Kate Lessard: Oh, very cool. I love to hear stuff like that. Mike Gerholdt: I was like, "Seriously?" Joshua Birk: Right. Mike Gerholdt: Now I have no idea. This is where my limited information comes in because Josh, it's a React site or it's a React page or I don't know what to do with it after that, but I was just like, "Oh, I could make my whole instance look

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli, Founder and Principal Consultant for Throughline HR LLC, and William Walsh, Salesforce and AI Recruitment Lead at Harvey Nash. Join us as we chat about what Salesforce employers are looking for in new hires and how to get your career started. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli and William Walsh. How the Salesforce Admin job market has changed Over the past few years, the role of the admin has changed a lot. It's no longer about how many certifications you have or how many users you can manage. While those skills are still important, being a great Salesforce Admin is much more about how you put that knowledge into action to support core business processes and generate value for your organization. So how do you stand out from the crowd? That's what I wanted to talk about with Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli and William Walsh. As recruiters, they see the Salesforce Admin job market from both sides: what it's like when you're looking for a role and what employers are asking for when they hire. Increasingly, it's not just about what you can do in Salesforce, but how you can connect it to the business and make an impact. Talk about business impact The number one thing that Maria looks for in a Salesforce Admin is requirements literacy. "It's not just being able to take a set of orders and execute it, but really be able to fine-tune that," she says. "Push back, make recommendations, be in front of what's happening and have that longer future vision, knowing that so many of these runways are going to be short with AI." Showing you have that skill is tricky, but it starts with how you talk about your experience. Are you describing features, or are you talking about the benefits? Don't just list outcomes; talk about impact. You need to show that you can think bigger than what you're building and understand how it fits with larger organizational goals. The power of showing up William urges job seekers to spend real, face-to-face time in the Salesforce community. At this point, everybody has shiny, AI-polished LinkedIn profiles and resumes. But meeting someone and making a connection with them can be so much more powerful than sitting in front of your computer mass-applying to every job opening you come across. "This ecosystem is super welcoming, and everybody wants to see everybody succeed," William says. "So go to some user groups, some local events, and you'll see how quickly people around you start to root for you and start to put your resume in front of the people they know." Maria and William have a ton of great tips for interviews and navigating the Salesforce Admin job market, so make sure to listen to the full episode. And while you're at it, subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us every Thursday. Podcast swag Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store Learn more Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: What Skills Transfer Well Into a Salesforce Admin Career? Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: How the Salesforce Administrator Role Is Evolving in the Agentic AI Era Admin Trailblazers Group Admin Trailblazers Community Group Social Maria on LinkedIn William on LinkedIn Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn Salesforce Admins on X Mike on Bluesky social Mike on Threads Mike on X Full show transcript Mike: The Salesforce admin job market looks a lot different than it did a few years ago. So, what are employers actually looking for right now? And how do you make sure your resume, experience, and interview skills line up with that? Well, today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, I'm talking with Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli, founder of Throughline HR, and William Walsh, who leads Salesforce and AI recruitment at Harvey Nash. We get into why certifications alone aren't enough, how industry experience can help you stand out, and why curiosity and communication matter so much once you get into the interview. So, whether you're looking for your first admin job or your next admin, we're also going to tell you about where it's worth spending your time. With that, let's get Maria and William on the podcast. So, Maria and William, welcome to the podcast. Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli: Thank you so much for having. William Walsh: Thank you. Thank you for having us. Mike: This is going to be exciting. I have not had two people on in the job space ever, so I go from zero to two, which is smart. But Maria, let's start with you. Tell us a little bit about what you do in the job recruiting, job placement space. Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli: Absolutely. Well, thanks so much for having us. My name is Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli. I am the founder and CEO and principal consultant for Throughline HR LLC. And very much in the vein of what we're talking about, this is my new solopreneurship venture launched in the last two months in response to everything that's happening in the job market. I've done every side of the recruiting, staffing, hired and being hired from doing Salesforce recruiting at Robert Half, supporting them, Protiviti, staff augmentation to going in-house with Vicasso, formerly Internet Creations, helping build both professional services and their ISV side. I worked at Salesforce directly in workforce development in Salesforce Talent Alliance under alliances and channels and helped get employer commitments to continuing to grow the ecosystem, investing in that top of the funnel Salesforce talent, building programs to help bring people in, admins, BAs, developers. And now I am working all different roles, but still very much in touch with the Salesforce ecosystem, still working with so many of the amazing partners that I've built relationships with over the years, supporting outsource hiring, staffing, job coaching, and career guidance. Mike: Wow. So, a few things. Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli: Just a couple things. Mike: William, how about yourself?  William Walsh: Yeah, I don't know if I'm as impressive as Maria, but I'll try to keep up as we go along here. But I lead our Salesforce and AI recruitment practice at Harvey Nash. So, here, what I basically do is work with companies across not only the Salesforce ecosystem, but multiple CRMs as we continue to grow. And that ranges to help them build out their teams of admins, business analysts, all the way up to architects, AI specialists, data focused people and leadership roles as well. The neat thing about what I do is I work really closely with both sides of the market. So, I'm talking to not only hiring managers for what they need for their teams, but also speaking with Salesforce professionals every day on what they're seeing in the market and where they want to take their careers next. So, I think I get a pretty unique view of the market from both the employer and candidate side.  And a big part of my job is understanding obviously where those two things line up. So, hope we can give everybody some good information today as to what employers are really looking for and how to stand out in this ever-changing job market. Mike: Yeah, I think that's why I was so excited. Shout out to Umer who was on the podcast a long time before he even joined Salesforce that connected all of us. But I love that both of you had the same but different lenses into the job market. And William, you set me up perfectly. So, I mean that's the first question on my list, which is when you look at the Salesforce job market right now, specifically for the admin role, what are you seeing? William Walsh: Yeah, I think it's definitely a more competitive market than it was a few years ago. I think there's a lot of really good admins out there. So, just being that Salesforce admin and having a few certifications on your resume isn't really necessarily enough anymore. What I'm seeing clients respond to is admins who really understand businesses behind the platform, whether it's sales, service, operations, data, which I'm sure we'll talk about a little bit more, but really admins who can show they've solved business problems in Salesforce are the ones that are standing out currently. People that can, again, not just be that general admin, but can differentiate themselves with whether it's an AI tool or a specific industry, that's kind of been the biggest thing that I've seen change. It's become a much broader role. Again, a company would just look for someone who was able to manage users, build reports, handle workflows, keep the org up and running. Now they really want someone who can be a real business partner for them, understand the data and automation integrations. So, I don't think the admin role has necessarily become much of a different role, but it's definitely, you want to add some more skill sets to just your generalist admin at this point. Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli: Absolutely agree. I think we're seeing a really important evolution and one that really follows a lot of what we've seen before in ERP and MCSC before where you're getting a role that used to be about just configuration, build this, set this up. You had a lot of single seat admins that assist admin, a lot of people didn't even call themselves Salesforce admins when I first started recruiting in this space, which is what made it so difficult. And now there's this concentrated branding and it's evolving into this governance and you really need to be able to stand out in ways that say, to William's point, this is an outcome I can provide, not here's the number of seats I can manage, but this is what I'm able to do in terms of business impact. I understand how this is going to affect what the top line is for the company, how this evolves into the mission. People need to understand the actual companies, not just the platform itself. Mike: Those are really good points, I think. And that's one thing to jump off of too is so broader, I heard partnering with the organization, not just managing

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Sabrina Simeroth, Product Manager on the Salesforce Security Product Team. Join us as we chat about the new Security Center Essentials feature and how to work security reviews into the rhythm of your organization. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Sabrina Simeroth. What is Security Center Essentials? The last time we had Sabrina on the pod, we were talking about Health Check scores. However, as she explains, that number is meant to be an assessment of your organization's security Configurables at a single point in time. But what about continuous monitoring? That's where Security Center Essentials comes in. "With Essentials, we're trying to give a broader and more ongoing visibility," Sabrina explains, with a focused set of security metrics you can monitor over time. It makes it easy to see things like what managed packages are supported, which third-party platforms have access to your data, and who in your organization made changes. In other words, Security Center Essentials gives you a map for how your org is structured, making it easier to spot potential problems and make sure your security and governance are aligned with your business goals. Two questions to ask for security reviews So how do you get started with Security Center Essentials? For Sabrina, it's all about context. Once you've run Health Check and dialed in your security settings and policies, you want to use the metrics on Security Center Essentials to get context for how things work in your organization. From there, Sabrina recommends asking yourself two key questions: What should be in my environment? Who owns this managed package? Who installed it? Who is using it? What has changed most recently? Were you expecting it? Who did it? How does it affect your business processes? Sabrina recommends establishing a monitoring cadence around regular business process milestones. If something is updated every Tuesday, check before and after to make sure everything happened as expected. As an admin, you have the best operational context to flag potential problems and bring them to your security and governance team. Why you shouldn't chase a perfect Health Check score While your Health Check score is helpful for giving you a general understanding of how your security standards compare to industry best practices, Sabrina urges you not to chase a perfect score. "Your Health Check score should begin a security review, rather than ending a review," she explains. It's there to flag areas of your org that need a closer look, so you can make decisions about how much intentional risk your business needs to carry. The most dangerous security threats are the ones you don't know about. It's OK not to have a perfect Health Check score, as long as you know why you're doing it. Make sure to listen to my full conversation with Sabrina about how to use Security Center Essentials and Health Check. And don't forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode. Podcast swag Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store Learn more Salesforce Help Docs: Security Center Essentials Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: What Are Security Essentials for Salesforce Admins? Kate Clicks Through It: Protect Your Salesforce Org With Health Check Admin Trailblazers Group Admin Trailblazers Community Group Social Sabrina on LinkedIn Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn Salesforce Admins on X Mike on Bluesky social Mike on Threads Mike on X Full show transcript Mike: Security is one of those things where it's really easy to look at a score and think, "Great. I'm done." But your Salesforce org doesn't sit still and neither does your security posture. Today I'm talking with Sabrina Simeroth from the Salesforce Security product team about Security Center Essentials and how admins can use it to understand what's connected to their org, what's changed, and what deserves a closer look. We talk about why getting a perfect Health Check score isn't necessarily the goal and how to work security reviews into the rhythms of your organization. So if you've ever opened up a security dashboard and wondered, "Okay, what am I actually supposed to pay attention to?" This episode is for you. Let's get Sabrina on the podcast. So Sabrina, welcome to the podcast. Sabrina Simeroth: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me back. Mike: Well, it's worth talking about because security is always top of mind for Salesforce admins. And the last time I had you and Laura on, we were talking about Security Center Essentials. And I think if memory serves me right, people now have that available to them and admins can start getting in touch with it, right? Sabrina Simeroth: Yeah. Absolutely. So that has been launched and it is fully rolled out. They should be able to see that in production orgs and some sandbox orgs as well. Mike: Sweet. So you're integral part of security at Salesforce and you do a lot. Refresh my memory, what's your domain and what do you handle at Salesforce? Sabrina Simeroth: Yeah, absolutely. So I sit on the product management team. I support our security center product and that also incorporates the Essentials product that we just launched and some of our other free tools like Health Check in setup. And then I actually work really closely with a few other PMs that support other features of the premium products like our agentic features and work really closely with the Shield team as well. Mike: Shield. Sabrina Simeroth: Yes. Mike: Yes. Sabrina Simeroth: All security, all the time. Mike: Our secret MCU product. So let's talk about Security Center Essentials and actually Health Check. I'd love to know, and probably admins too, we love when we get these features, but what exactly were you trying to solve with Health Check? Sabrina Simeroth: Yeah. So Health Check is a really valuable ... I would call it a point in time assessment of some of the critical settings that we find in setup. These are your security configurations. Oftentimes if you've been to any events, you hear them called configurables. So these are settings like your password policies, your session settings, some of those toggles that you can turn on and off. But with the Essentials, we're trying to give a broader and more ongoing visibility. So it's not just a point in time, this is something that extends that capability. Health Check is still really valuable and it is a collection of these configurations that are set against a baseline or a set of standards so that you can see where your posture is at at any given time. But we really wanted to extend that and allow admins the ability to see how changes in their system, how changes in their configuration occur over time, as well as broaden the view of what they're actually looking at. So not just those toggles. Mike: I always liked Health Check was like right now, here's where you're at with links to open things. So that makes sense. It's making the dashboard a little bit bigger. I think for a Salesforce admin who just opens Security Center Essentials for the first time and they have a whole bunch of different metrics looking back at them, where should they focus? I think of a car dashboard. Well, if I start my car and the fuel light comes on, probably the most important thing to pay attention to. But as an admin, depending on the level of security awareness that I have, I may not know what number is the most important number. So help me walk through those different metrics that they're seeing. Sabrina Simeroth: Yeah. You are so spot on. So I think there's a tendency to want to stack rank, which is the most important thing to look at. If I could put it very simply, so we started with a very narrow scope of, let's call it metrics. So we wanted to extend the capabilities of Health Check. We wanted to give a broader view and give admins access to what does the actual state of your org look like? What are the things that are connected to your org? What are the managed packages that are being supported? Where are your access points? Those types of things. These are all really critical things for admins to be aware of because it's basically how is your org structured? So I think that that's the key. It's not that you should focus on or stack rank immediately any one metric in Essentials. It's more around let's figure out what our baseline is and what is the actual standard for our environment. So I would resist saying one over the other. Obviously, I think the tendency is to lean towards let me look at the thing that has a score. Let me look at Health Check. I would actually say, ask yourself two questions as an admin. What looks unfamiliar to me? So look at the seven metrics. And I apologize in advance because come Dreamforce, we're extending that seven metrics to 14 metrics, but we're still keeping the scope very narrow. Mike: It's no like Salesforce to just double anything, right? Sabrina Simeroth: No. Not at all. But we're trying to bring the most critical things for you to pay attention to the forefront and just keep it narrow so that you have a really, really solid idea of what should be in my environment and then what has changed most recently. Those are the two things to be really looking at so that you can start asking yourself questions. Does this actually make sense? Should it be here? Is there an assigned owner? These are the types of questions. It's really about laying out a map for the admin to start getting the right context about how the org is configured and then start evaluating is this good or bad and does it align with the business needs? So that would be my advice using essentials. Mike: Yeah. No. It makes sense. And I think you pointed out that what's really nice is you're not just seeing today's configuration, you're seeing how things changed and that if you're a Salesforce admin, whether you're just gett

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Alexis Kingma, Senior Certification Developer at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about the newly updated Salesforce Certified Platform App Builder exam and the best way to prepare for certifications. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Alexis Kingma. The Salesforce Platform App Builder Certification gets a refresh The Salesforce Certified Platform App Builder exam has been updated, and the process is more complicated than you might think. This week, I'm talking to Alexis Kingma from the Salesforce Certification team to find out what's changed, why it matters, and how to best prepare for an exam. Whenever Alexis and her team are doing a refresh for an exam, they start by interviewing a range of subject matter experts working in the real world. For the Salesforce Certified Platform App Builder exam, they're trying to answer a simple question: "What is the industry saying is most important if somebody's looking to hire an app builder?" Alexis encourages you to think of a certification exam as a validation of your knowledge. In other words, it's proof that you have the expertise to build cutting-edge apps and implement them in your organization. Shifting the focus to Flow and Agentforce So what's changed? The focus is on automations with Flow and Agentforce. As Alexis explains, if you're looking to hire an app builder, you're looking for someone with a deep understanding of Flow. Do you know which flows are best for which situations? Can you troubleshoot them? Can you maintain and monitor them? They want to make sure that anyone who passes the certification exam has the Flow expertise they need to hit the ground running. The other change is including Agentforce as an automation tool for app building. While you don't need to be a power user (there's another certification for that), Alexis and her team want to make sure that you have it as an option in your toolkit. How to prepare for Salesforce certification exams According to Alexis, every Salesforce certification serves as a gauge for your practical, on-the-job skills. This means if you are currently building applications for your company, you are already ahead of the curve. To support the recent updates, her team has curated a specialized Trailhead trail that features interactive badges, allowing you to practice directly within a sandbox environment. Alexis also highly recommends taking a close look at the exam guide for any certification you're going for. They're written very intentionally, she explains, to give you a very specific idea of what level of understanding they're asking for on each topic. Words like "create" or "configure" are asking for much more in-depth knowledge than "describe" or "understand." Finally, if you're attending Dreamforce, Alexis wants to remind you to schedule your free certification exam. Make sure to listen to the full episode for more about the Salesforce Platform App Builder certification exam. And don't forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us every Thursday. Podcast swag Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store Learn more Exam Page: Salesforce Certified Platform App Builder Trailhead: Prepare for Your Salesforce Platform App Builder Certification Dreamforce: Guide to Certification Exams at Dreamforce 2026 Admin Trailblazers Group Admin Trailblazers Community Group Social Alexis on LinkedIn Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn Salesforce Admins on X Mike on Bluesky social Mike on Threads Mike on X   Full show transcript Mike: This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, I'm talking with Alexis Kingma from the Salesforce certification team about the newly-refreshed Salesforce Certified Platform App Builder exam. We're going to get into exactly what changed, why Flow now has a bigger role on the exam, and where Agentforce fits into the app builder skillset. So whether the Platform App Builder is your next certification or you just want a better sense of where admin skills are headed, this episode is worth a listen. Now, before we get into it, be sure to subscribe and share it with any other admin who's thinking about their next certification. So with that, let's get Alexis on the podcast. So, Alexis, welcome to the podcast. Alexis Kingma: Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. Mike: Well, I am a huge fan of our exams and certifications. And you can take one, you don't have to have the other, and I like to have both. But I love that we have a lot of exams and we redo them, we update them, we refresh them, at least we try to. I feel the product now is changing super quick. But before we get into all of that, Alexis, tell us a little bit about your history and how you came to Salesforce and what you do at Salesforce. Alexis Kingma: Absolutely. So I am on the Salesforce certification team. We are a team of Salesforce employees who are solely dedicated to creating and updating the whole suite of Salesforce exams. So, historically, I come from a certification industry background. I've done software certification my entire career. And I came to Salesforce about two, two and a half years ago and just hit the ground running. I joined the team updating and creating new Salesforce certifications. So I actually started with the Tableau certifications and have since moved over into my latest, which is refreshing the Salesforce Certified Platform App Builder exam. Mike: Ooh, yes, app builder, that's something all of us admins are near and dear to our hearts on. And that's cool. I mean, I guess there's enough tech out there in the world that there's enough people that need to write certification exams for all of it. Wow. This is one of those ideas of, I bet 20 years ago, that job maybe didn't exist, but it exists now. Alexis Kingma: It's funny, certification is such a rich industry, it's one of those jobs that I feel like nobody knows it exists until you have that job. Nobody grows up saying, "I want to write tests," but now it's all of our favorite things to do. Mike: No, I mean, you're exactly right, nobody sits down and, "What do you want to do when you grow up?" And it's, "I want to sit down and write really hard software questions for people about a cloud-based platform that they can configure declaratively." Alexis Kingma: Right. Mike: I think if you would've answered that, your teacher would've been, "And you're an astronaut today." Alexis Kingma: But it is interesting, the same principles that we use to write Salesforce software certifications are the same principles that are used for the medical boards, for firefighting certifications, for airline certifications. And so when we come together at certification industry events, it's a whole gamut of industries coming together to talk about the same certification principles. So you get to meet a lot of interesting folks. Mike: I mean, you don't ever think of that, but that is really... Wow, I bet that's really interesting to sit across the table from people that write certifications to be a rocket scientist. Alexis Kingma: Absolutely. Yes. A lot of these certifications, like for a professional roofer, that's a high-stakes certification, or an architect. So it's interesting to hear how all these different industries approach the same problems. Mike: Yeah. Well, we're still high stakes too. Alexis Kingma: Absolutely. Mike: So you mentioned Platform App Builder exam. It got a refresh, which it's probably needed, I mean, every few months, right? But I think before we get into that, what does it mean to refresh an exam? Alexis Kingma: So the Platform App Builder exam has been around for over 10 years. It predates me at Salesforce by far. We're actually in our 11th year this year, which is awesome. And so it's been around for so long and the role changes and evolves so much in that time. And so it's important for us to look at the role, look at the requirements in the industry, what are admins doing, what are app builders doing, what are architects doing, what is the most important knowledge that those roles need, and how does our exam align to that? And making sure that the things that we're testing out on the exam are actually things that are the most important for these roles in the real world. Mike: Yeah. I mean, that was always one of the hard parts, I remember, when I first got one of my certifications. At the time, we didn't use a lot of Service Cloud, Agentforce for Service, I think now, but I had to go out and learn it because it was part of the certification. And I thought, "Oh, why should I have to learn that?" And I thought, "Well, just because you don't use it or your company doesn't use it, doesn't mean it shouldn't be part of that certification as well or that exam." Alexis Kingma: Absolutely. And so when we approach doing a refresh like we did with app builder, we try to include subject matter experts from a whole range, internal Salesforce employees, external Salesforce users, a wide breadth of roles, admins, people who are solely app builders, architects, to try to say, "Okay, Salesforce might say these topics are most important, but what is the industry saying is most important?" If somebody's looking to hire an app builder, what does that person expect the app builder brings to the table and what knowledge should they already have when they start the job? And so we rely on our subject matter experts to say, "What are those most important concepts, and how do we make sure that they're reflected on the exam?" Mike: Makes sense. I mean, that's the part of getting dialed in, to me, that I think is the most important is, one thing for Salesforce to think this is important, but where does that fall in terms of your responsibilities and what you're seeing day to day? Well, let's talk about this new exam, because Platform App Builder, I believe if you said it was been around for 10 years, then I've been a