My Unofficial Study Guide for the Certified Technical Architect
For more background on the whole process of CTA check out my lengthy post.
Prerequisites
– DEV401 or equivalent
– DEV501 or equivalent
– ADM201 or equivalent
– ADM301 or equivalent
– Sales Cloud Consultant Certification or equivalent
– Service Cloud Consultant Certification or equivalent
– Technical Architect Study Guide material
– Enterprise Technical Architecture – especially patterns for transversing from the cloud to a customers internal network
– Enterprise Business Architecture – especially identifying and managing stakeholders, business processes, and enterprise operating models
– How to talk to Salesforce (the different API options in and out)
– How to run a project (deep understanding and ability to articulate waterfall, iterative, and agile concepts)
– Lead Architect responsibilities including application life-cycle management, automated testing, continuous integration, etc
– Public Speaking
– Mobile Architecture Strategies and Differences
– Understanding of TCP/IP, SSL, x509, etc
White Papers
– Record Level Access: Under the Hood (one of my favorites – study it closely)
Developerforce
– How to Implement Single Sign-On with Force.com (Delegated Authentication)
Other blogs & resources
– REST
– All of the Technical Architect courses on the premier training salesforce portal
Videos
Other tips:
– Understand the security model and how to setup all of the different types of platform capabilities (Reports/Dashboards via Folders, Content via Libraries, Knowledge via Data Categories, Chatter via Groups, etc.)
– In the hypothetical scenario try to calculate basic volumes for the numbers that they throw at you and any inferred data model that is designed. Both of my hypotheticals dealt with inferred data volumes as opposed to explicitly defined data volumes
– Understand implicit sharing of the account to other objects as well as the fact that the account hierarchy does NOT implicitly grant any sharing across the account hierarchy
– Understand what happens to the role hierarchy when partner portal accounts are used (1-3 roles are appended underneath the internal account owners role)
– Understand how HVCP works and the sharing model (Sharing Sets, Sharing Groups, etc)
– I strongly recommend setting up a partner and customer community with all sorts of b2b accounts and b2c accounts and play around with the sharing features to fully vet them out
– Understand the detailed flows for OAuth, IdP init SAML, SP init SAML, and oAuth with SAML
– If you don’t fully grasp OAuth and SAML, setup your own identity provider and build out the solutions. The light did not go off for me until I built it out myself.
– Review all of the content on http://trust.salesforce.com
Good Luck!
The Enterprise Force.com Architect 
Thanks..Very useful.. Much appreciated.
This is awesome greg…Thanks a ton !!
This really Gr8 Greg !!! It will help me to achieve my salesforce TA Certification, awsomwe study material…very useful. Thanks a lot !!
~ Sandesh Kulkarni
I just cleared the multiple choice exam. Took 3 weeks (approx 4 hours daily) to prepare/go through all the above notes, along with taking the official DEV 502 training from Salesforce. Thanks much!!!
Sure – glad to help. Also remember to check out the new architect academy from Salesforce if you are looking for other material.