How to prepare Alfresco Process Services Certified Engineer

The Alfresco Process Services Certified Engineer (APSCE) it’s a new certification intended to prove experience and knowledge in the Process Services area (Activiti Enterprise). The certification has been recently released and currently, it’s hard to find a good guideline to prepare yourself for the exam. – Unless that you go through an official training.

Indeed, the main obstacle in getting ready for the test is the lack of material on the Internet. That’s why we want to share the guideline that we prepared for ourselves, to help other people and save them a LOT OF TIME.

You might wonder if this certification could be worth it to invest your money and time, or useful and relevant to undertake successfully an APS project. Those questions are fair enough and, in our personal opinion, the answer would be absolutely YES. As a matter of fact, you’ll find very few resources certified, because of that, Alfresco clients struggle to get the right professionals for their APS projects. Having this certification, will give you a strategical advantage and more important, it will provide your organization and your clients with confidence that their projects are in good hands, and it will help you to build a trustworthy reputation in the Alfresco industry.

We passed the exam and got the certification thanks to this guideline. If you want to get it too, we recommend you to follow the next steps:

1. Review the Blueprint

The official document about the exam is the blueprint, that is why it’s important to check this document first. If you look at the blueprint, you’ll see that the test has 60 questions and it’s comprised of seven sections:

• Architecture: 5 questions
• User Interface: 10 questions
• Security: 5 questions
• Process Logic: 13 questions
• Process Engine: 5 questions
• Customization: 10 questions
• APIS: 12 questions

2. Find and Organize the Information for Each Section

You need to determine, for each section, what information is required to study. It’s a tedious work, believe me,  but… it’s your lucky day! Here you have all that information already gathered.

• Architecture: 5 questions
  • High-Level Architecture
  • Web application structure
  • Embedding Alfresco Process Services into another application.
  • Maven modules
  • Custom web resources.
• User Interface: 10 questions
  • Task Form Customization and Form extension methods
  • Form stencils and custom form fields.
  • Stencils and Custom Tasks.
• Security: 5 questions
  • Custom identity synchronization.
  • Security configuration overrides.
• Process Logic: 13 questions
  • Document templates
  • Spring Beans
  • Script Tasks
  • Task Listeners
  • Java delegates
  • Service Tasks
  • Messages
  • Signals
  • Process Modeling.
• Process Engine: 5 questions
  • Event handlers.
  • Custom engine configuration
  • Transaction Management.
• Customization: 10 questions
  • Custom REST endpoints.
  • Custom rule expression functions
  • Custom data models
  • Custom reports
• APIS: 12 questions
  • Java API
  • REST API

3. Study

You have to take into consideration that this is not an easy test, it will require from you a good amount of hours to get ready, and memorize file names, classes, events, etc.

To study in a more efficient way, we suggest you distribute your time among the different areas considering your experience, knowledge and their weight in the exam.

4. Test Your Knowledge

It’s a good practice to create questions for each sub-section, that will help you to assess your knowledge quickly. Here you can find some of the sample questions that we have created.

5. Finally, Schedule a Test

Schedule a test here.

Good luck!!!

Please, leave a comment and share anything that you think could be useful to prepare successfully this certification.

Thanks!