Sitecore Certified Administrator training

There is often confusion around the intended audience and curriculum for the Sitecore Certified Administrator (SCA) training. Two misconceptions are common:

1) The training is for non-technical business users, typically Sitecore "power users."
2) The training is for technical IT staff, interested in system administrative topics.

The first misconception is based on the fact that none of the activities in SCA require knowledge of ASP.NET (or even HTML) coding.

While this is true, students with no technical background will certainly struggle with a number of concepts in SCA, particularly security, workflows and Sitecore architecture. While the coverage of security in SCA is presented in very basic terms, the curriculum still assumes familiarity with basic security concepts such as hierarchical inheritance. If you have never set NT security permissions, Sitecore security may seem daunting.

The second misconception interprets "administrator" as a traditional system administrator. Trainees expecting coverage of Sitecore deployment, database maintenance, network security and file permissions will be disappointed. For purposes of SCA, "administrator" refers to a user whose job responsibilities include basic content authoring, publishing, configuring of workflows and Sitecore security administration.

Who, then, is the ideal audience for this training? A business user who has on-the-job experience with Sitecore's editing interfaces and wants to dig more deeply into the product will likely learn new and valuable information from SCA. SCA can clarify how your existing Sitecore workflows and security permissions operate and how they might be tweaked as business requirements evolve.

A final note about this training: All of the topics in SCA are covered in-depth in SCD1. If you have taken SCD1, there is no need to take SCA.

For more information about administrative topics in Sitecore, check out the "End User" section of the SDN: http://sdn5.sitecore.net/End%20User.aspx