System Architect Practice Exam: Test Your Knowledge 2025

A global company uses Salesforce as the primary CRM and needs users to access Salesforce, a custom HR portal, and a third-party expense application with one set of credentials. The security team wants Salesforce to act as the identity provider. Which solution should the architect recommend?

An architect is designing record access for a private data model. Sales representatives should only see their own Opportunities, while regional managers should automatically see records owned by users in their role hierarchy. Which feature primarily provides this access?

A company wants to integrate Salesforce with an external billing platform. The billing platform must be notified immediately whenever an Invoice__c record is created or updated in Salesforce. Near-real-time delivery is required, and the external platform can expose a REST endpoint. Which integration pattern is the best fit?

A solution requires an external enterprise identity system to authenticate users attempting to log in to Salesforce. User credentials must not be stored in Salesforce. Which capability should be used?

An architect needs to recommend a scalable event-driven mechanism for publishing business events from Salesforce to multiple subscribing systems with loose coupling. Which option best meets this requirement?

A company is merging two business units into a single Salesforce org. One business unit requires strict data segregation so users cannot report on, search for, or view the other unit's customer records, except for a small shared service team. Which design should the architect recommend first?

A customer service organization has millions of Case records and frequently experiences slow list views and reports. Users mainly work with recent records, while historical cases older than five years are rarely accessed but must remain available for compliance. What is the best architectural recommendation?

A company must integrate Salesforce with an ERP system for order fulfillment. When an Opportunity is marked Closed Won, Salesforce must send the order to ERP immediately. Users do not need to wait for ERP processing to finish, but failures must be monitored and retried. Which approach is most appropriate?

A company has a single Salesforce org serving internal sales users and an external partner community. Partners should only access records related to accounts they manage, and internal users should retain full collaboration capabilities. Which design consideration is most important when modeling this requirement?

An architect is designing a customer onboarding process across Salesforce, a document management system, and a KYC verification service. The business requires steps to occur in sequence, some steps to wait for external confirmation, and a full audit trail of the overall process. Which architectural approach is best?

A company wants to support mobile sales teams in regions with intermittent connectivity. Users must be able to view and update key account and opportunity data when offline and sync when they reconnect. Which recommendation best aligns to this requirement?

A multinational company needs a consent management design. Customers can withdraw marketing consent in one channel, and that change must propagate to all consuming systems quickly to prevent further outreach. Different systems own different customer attributes. What is the best high-level design recommendation?

A company plans to let a custom external web application call Salesforce APIs on behalf of users. The application should obtain Salesforce access tokens securely after user authorization without handling user passwords directly. Which mechanism is most appropriate?

An implementation has frequent record locking errors when many users and integrations update child records under the same parent account at peak hours. What should the architect analyze first?

A Salesforce org has grown organically for years. There are overlapping workflows, flows, Apex triggers, and validation rules on the same objects, causing unpredictable side effects and difficult troubleshooting. What architectural issue does this most clearly indicate?

A customer reports that a report on a custom object is very slow. The object contains tens of millions of records. The report filters on a non-selective field that matches a large percentage of rows. What is the most likely architectural cause?

A company is deciding whether Salesforce should be the system of record for product pricing. Pricing changes originate in an external pricing engine several times per hour, and quoting requires the latest approved values. Salesforce users also need historical price visibility for prior quotes. What is the best architectural assessment?

A development team wants every environment change to be performed manually in production because they believe it gives better control. The architect is concerned about quality and traceability. What is the best recommendation?

An enterprise architect wants to reduce long-term technical debt in a Salesforce program with multiple scrum teams building on the same core objects. Which governance mechanism will be most effective?

A regulated organization needs to ensure that sensitive fields such as national ID numbers are protected throughout the application lifecycle. Which governance approach is most appropriate?