Salesforce.com Winter ‘12 Certification Maintenance has been announced today. The Winter ‘12 product release is expected on October 7, 2011 and October 14, 2011. All the Salesforce.com certified professionals, will be responsible for completing a Winter ‘12 release maintenance exam in order to maintain their certification credential.

Winter ‘12 release maintenance exams will be available on Monday, October 31, 2011. All certified professionals will receive a subsequent email notification once the exams are available for registration. To take Winter ‘12 release maintenance exam you have to first complete, any previous maintenance exams required for your credential before you can register for the Winter ‘12 release maintenance exam.

Winter ‘12 Release Training

The Winter ‘12 Release Training can be accessed from Help & Training; just click Take Training, select Online Training, and navigate to “Winter ’12 Release Training.”

There are six modules in the training course. We strongly recommend that you take all six modules, but when preparing for your certification maintenance exam, use the following guidelines for study:

Salesforce.com Certified Administrators:

• Collaboration Cloud
• Sales Cloud
• Data.com
• Analytics
• Force.com topics: Cloud-based Flow Designer, Siteforce
• Database.com topics: Database.com, Permission Sets, Schema Builder

Salesforce.com Certified Force.com Developers:

• Force.com
• Database.com
• Analytics
• Collaboration cloud topic: Additional Information about the Chatter Enhancements

Winter ‘12 Release Notes

The Winter ‘12 Release Notes can be accessed from:

http://www.sfdcstatic.com/assets/pdf/misc/Winter12_ReleaseNotes.pdf

It is advisable to read the complete notes before attempting the exam. Release Notes give in detail the new functionality added and what is its impact of end users and / or on administrators and developers.

Those appearing in the exam can share their opinions and views by writing in the comments below.