I write my own material, rerun every exercise before the session, and my examples come from the Salesforce programmes I ran for clients. For anyone organising an ADX201 session, the course turns on two checks, not on its title: the trainee will administer Salesforce and already knows the basics, and the trainer teaches automation in Flow. Workflow rules and Process Builder, which the published programme still cites, have been unsupported since 31 December 2025.
An example from one of my ADX201 sessions. In this course the exercises build on one another: each relies on objects and fields created in the previous one. On day 4, when we reached reports, some trainees did not have the object created the day before, and the import stalled on the parent-child order. My materials, revised in October 2026, give every exercise its starting point, a five-minute catch-up and a supplied data set. That is the kind of detail to ask every candidate trainer about.
Who is ADX201 for?
The official title is Administrative Essentials for New Admins in Lightning Experience (ADX201), over 5 days. The catalogue programme calls it “L’essentiel de l’administration Salesforce” and places it at foundation level. The target audience is new administrators, responsible for installing, configuring and maintaining Salesforce in their company.
The programme also welcomes power users, sales operations teams and IT managers who want to go deeper. For these profiles, the question is what the person will do in the org after the session. A salesperson who mainly wants to follow their accounts and opportunities more closely is a better fit for BSX101, designed for people who need to understand Salesforce’s main functions without being its administrators.
ADX201 is one of the courses already taught: five sessions in 2026, between February and September, one of them in-house. The next runs from 16 to 20 November 2026. The course is offered as a virtual class or onsite.
What should you check before enrolling someone?
The official prerequisite fits in one line: know Salesforce’s basic concepts and functions. Salesforce also recommends the trailmix “Administrative Essentials for New Admins Prework”. This prerequisite is hard to read on an enrolment form, so ask the trainee or their manager something concrete instead: what do they already do in the org, every week?
The second point is English. The course prepares for the administrator certification (Platform Administrator), whose exam exists only in English, and not every term is translated. Decent English therefore helps, even for those not aiming for the exam.
The third point is logistics. In September 2026, with a partly remote group, getting everyone connected to the org delayed the first morning’s start by a quarter of an hour, and screen sharing cut out several times during demonstrations. I now send access details the evening before with a step-by-step procedure, and I check screen sharing at the start of each half-day. On the planner’s side, what remains is to make sure the address given for each trainee is the one they actually read.
That leaves comparing trainers on their preparation. In one September 2026 session, an exercise on restriction rules started while the expected field did not exist on the standard object being used, and a Salesforce outage blocked practice for several hours on day 3. I now prepare each exercise’s object before the session and keep an offline fallback exercise ready. Two questions to ask every trainer: what happens when a trainee does not have the object created the day before? What do they plan if the org stops responding? One trainee’s feedback points the same way: “A su réadapter le support au fil des jours” (“adapted the material as the days went on”; ADX201 trainee, PLB, 2026).
What does the official programme cover?
Put in a planner’s words, the official programme comes down to five blocks. Trainees learn to adapt the application to their team’s processes: page layouts, fields, tabs, business processes. They build a secure environment. They import data and learn to keep it clean. They create reports and dashboards that get used. Finally, they automate a process.
These blocks follow one another in the exercises, as the import example above showed. At project scale, the same parent-child ordering question comes back in a Salesforce data migration, with different stakes and different signatories.
What the programme does not promise matters as much for placement. Automation gets a single objective: automate a process. In-depth work on Flow is the core of ADX211, where Flow takes 4 chapters out of 11. For in-depth work on Flow, aim for ADX211, after ADX201.
What does Winter ‘27 change for the course?
The production release is Winter ‘27 (API 68.0), rolled out in waves since late August 2026. For ADX201, two changes matter.
The first concerns automation. The published programme still cites Process Builder and workflow rules. According to Salesforce Help, both have been unsupported since 31 December 2025: the course’s automation is done in Flow. Trainees may still find these tools in their company’s org, and they need to recognise them. Rebuilding them in Flow is a separate piece of work, with an owner and a deadline, to treat as Salesforce technical debt rather than as an end-of-course exercise.
The second concerns the org itself. A new Winter ‘27 org contains sample data. What today’s org shows is therefore checked in a fresh org before each session, not from memory.
To choose between two trainers, these two changes give two questions: is the automation module done in Flow? Have the exercises been rerun in a fresh Winter ‘27 org? The answers can be checked in the materials themselves.
The Spring ‘27 release notes are expected in mid or late December 2026. Until then, Winter ‘27 is the reference, and an announced feature changes nothing in the course until it appears in a fresh org.
ADX201 or ADX211: how do you decide?
The full comparison of the two courses is in the note ADX201 or ADX211. For the planner, the question fits in one line: is the trainee new to administration, or do they already administer an org?
ADX211 (Administer, Extend, and Automate Salesforce) lasts 4 days, at advanced level. It is aimed at administrators with at least six months’ experience who have taken ADX201, with a prerequisite multiple-choice test before entry. It prepares for the Platform Administrator II exam, which the Trailhead page on administrator certifications presents as the one for experienced administrators. Flow is its core, and that is where the new Flow features of Winter ‘27 are worked on, such as test mode for record-triggered flows, still in beta.
The two placement mistakes show quickly. Placed in ADX201, an administrator already in the role redoes tasks they know. Placed in ADX211, a newcomer arrives without the basics the course assumes. That leaves the profile in between: they already administer, but only recently or without having taken ADX201. The planner then starts from the tasks the person actually performs in the org; the ADX211 prerequisite, for its part, remains having taken ADX201.