What this is about # Domain 4 of the Claude Certified Associate – Foundations exam is Prompting and Task Execution. It’s worth 14%. The framing that matters here: ask Claude to “write something about our Q3 results” and you get a generic paragraph. Specify the audience, the three results that matter, the format, and the length, and you get a draft you can almost send. The model didn’t get smarter between those two requests. The prompt did. This domain treats prompting as a communication discipline with learnable structure, not a knack some people have.
What this is about # Domain 3 of the Claude Certified Associate – Foundations exam is Governance, Risk, and Responsible Use. It’s worth 15%. The framing is blunt: sensitive data uploaded to the wrong place, an untrusted Skill granted broad access, a quiet policy violation at the wrong moment — any one of these can freeze an entire organization’s AI program and cost every team the productivity it had gained. Governance isn’t a policy binder on a shelf. It’s exercised by practitioners, one decision at a time — which makes it a skill you build, not a document you read once.
What this is about # Domain 2 of the Claude Certified Associate – Foundations exam is Workflow Integration and Solution Design. It’s worth 16% — second only to Output Evaluation, which Part 3 already covered. Where that domain asked “is this one output good?”, this one asks a different question entirely: where does Claude actually belong in a workflow made of multiple steps, systems, and people — and where doesn’t it? Getting an individual answer right doesn’t matter much if you’ve wired it into the wrong place in the process.
What this is about # Domain 1 of the Claude Certified Associate – Foundations exam is Output Evaluation and Validation. It’s worth 21% — more than any other domain on the exam. The whole domain comes down to one idea: good-looking output is not the same thing as validated output. Fluent, confident text doesn’t tell you anything about whether it’s actually correct. This post breaks down the framework for closing that gap, on purpose, instead of by accident.
The chat window is where most people stop # Open Claude, type a question, get an answer, close the tab. Next week, same question-shaped task, same blank chat window, same explaining from zero: who you are, what you’re working on, what “good” looks like for this kind of output. If that’s the whole relationship, you’re using one of the most capable tools available today exactly like you’d use a search box — or, more to the point, exactly like people used ChatGPT in 2020, when a fresh context window every time was just how these things worked.
What this is about # Anthropic’s AI Fluency course breaks working with AI into four competencies instead of a pile of prompt tricks: Delegation, Description, Discernment, Diligence. The 4Ds. I went in expecting a prompting course and came out with a decision framework instead — one that’s less about writing better prompts and more about deciding what to hand off, how to communicate it, how to judge what comes back, and who’s accountable for it. Here’s each one, condensed to what actually matters.
The warning nobody should click past # Every SSH and SFTP client has the same scary moment: you connect to a server you’ve connected to a hundred times before, and instead of a normal prompt you get something like this from OpenSSH:
Three protocols, one job, very different guts # FTP, FTPS, and SFTP all claim to do the same thing — move a file from one place to another — and partners use the names almost interchangeably, which is exactly the problem. They are three genuinely different protocols with different port models, different security properties, and different failure modes, and the SFTP Server Adapter and SFTP Client Adapter you configure in Sterling only make sense once you know which one you’re actually running. This post goes through each one on its own terms, then spends the back half on SFTP specifically, since that’s what carries the overwhelming majority of partner traffic in B2Bi.
The connection runs backward from what you’d guess # Most people’s first assumption about a box sitting in the DMZ is that your trusted, internal network reaches out to it — the secure side initiates, the exposed side listens. A Perimeter Server does the opposite. The core B2Bi engine sitting safely inside your network never opens a connection out into the DMZ at all. Instead, the Perimeter Server — the box actually facing partners and the internet — dials back in to the core engine and holds that connection open. Partner traffic lands on the DMZ box first, and only then gets forwarded inward over a channel the DMZ side itself established.
The confusion I flagged back in Part 1 # I called this out in Part 1 and promised to come back to it: File Gateway is not a separate product competing with B2Bi. It’s a purpose-built UI and routing layer sitting directly on top of B2Bi’s mailbox and adapter machinery, built specifically so partner file exchange can be managed without anyone touching BPML directly. I still see people who’ve run Sterling for years talk about the two as if they’re alternatives you choose between. They’re not — one is the foundation, the other is a way of working with that foundation without writing a Business Process by hand.
