Today I passed the confluence administrator (ACP-200) exam in my first attempt - thought of sharing my experience while it's fresh in my mind , as saying goes sharing is caring , hoping my learnings from preparation and exam can help the Atlassian community friends.
Little background about myself - I’m working as Solutions Architect to manage ALM and CI stacks for an airline company with around an year of experience with confluence more around upgrade automation but less on configuration details.
I must say Atlassian has done a great job in designing the exam , it was a bit challenging with real scenario based questions and expects more hands on.
I had 70 questions to solve in 180 mins.
At the very start I was thinking it's quite enough time but later realized there were few questions really lengthy and time consuming though I was able to go through almost all 70 questions in 2 hr 20 mins with some marked questions for review later (the one's on which I was not much sure) ; these last 40 mins really helped to revisit those one's and corrected some.
So here's the real thing which might help if you are looking to target for the exam.
Do spin up an empty instance of confluence (6.x latest) without any apps installed and try to go through each of the administrative sections like some mentioned below :
- System administrator/confluence administrator/Space admin permissions and privileges.
- If you have not played much with ‘macros' (which I had not much experience with) , would recommend spending time on it , trying to use each of the macros and have a good understanding on which one you would choose depending on requirement, the ones that use labels as well. Macro details
- "Permissions" is another key topic , "global" , "space" and "page restrictions". Create multiple users with different permissions and play around every level and have a good understanding on how it works , what happens when you delete users/groups. Permissions
- Re-indexing , Upgrade , backup/restore , Cache management , Emails/Notifications.
- High level understanding on - Cloud vs Server vs DataCenter. hosting options
- Different kinds of exports: Site/Space/Page. Exports
- Color schemes , Layouts, General configurations , Collaborative editing , Labels.
- Confluence plugins - you don’t need to know about specific plugins but mainly how you install plugins , do understand what is safe mode.
- Blueprints vs templates
I would encourage you to spend more time doing hands on around each of the offered functionalities and visiting each of the tabs to know more in confluence settings screen with descriptions.Most importantly the ones that you rarely use/come across in daily life.
Wishing you Good luck and hope you find it helpful.
Last but not the least - Key to clear the exam is time management and PRACTICE , PRACTICE AND PRACTICE …
Regards -
Gopal
