Salesforce Administrators are the ambassadors, leaders, and experts for all things Salesforce at their organizations. And a key part of being the Salesforce expert for your company is staying up to date on technologies available that can impact your business whether they are new tools you can take advantage of or updates to features that you already use. With three releases a year, it’s important to have a game plan in place for upcoming releases and I want to share the key ways I prepare for every Salesforce product release.
In order to be prepared, you first have to know what is coming and when. The Salesforce Trust calendar includes all relevant dates for your salesforce environment, including release schedules for your instance of salesforce. This is the source of truth for release dates and the best reference for when your next Salesforce release is coming. The Salesforce Release Notes are published in advance of every upcoming release, and this site provides the notes in a searchable HTML form, which makes it fast to find release details for the features you use most. And don’t forget to tune-in to Salesforce Release Readiness Live where you can watch Salesforce product managers provide roadmaps, demos, and technical overviews of their latest products and enhancements. A great way to stay on top of all these dates, webinars, and updates is to follow the Release Readiness Weekly Update in the success community.
Click around and take a look! Just like when you first learned how to customize Salesforce, getting into a test environment and building with features is the best way to understand how something works. Create new fields, customize your pages, experiment with new tools and features. I was so excited to hear about the Global Picklist Pilot in Spring ‘16 and in order to really understand how I could use this feature I built global picklists in my Pre-release environment, edited them, used them in objects and reports.
You can test drive upcoming features in two ways:
Once you have had a chance to play with the newest features, you may have questions! The best place to go for release related questions is the release readiness success community group. This is your one stop shop for the most relevant information on release dates, how to stay on top of the timeline and functionality, links to upcoming release webinars, and more. This group is where you can ask logistical questions about your sandbox refresh cycle and pre-release access, as well as product specific questions for feature functionality and details. This community is also an excellent place to see how other Admins are using pre-release features and exploring functionality, you may even get a great idea for how to use a new feature from a comment thread on this group!
It’s time to mark your calendars for the next Salesforce Release, Summer ’17! Here are the most important dates: April 20: Pre-Release Signup Goes Live Admins can sign up for a Developer Edition environment chock full of all the Summer ’17 features to explore to your heart’s content. Developer environments are stand-alone environments where you […]
Wow! Dreamforce 2025 was one for the books. From connecting and learning together to building the Agentic Enterprise, the event was packed with inspiration and innovation — including some game-changing announcements in the Admin Keynote. This year’s keynote took us to Coral Cloud Resorts, a fictional luxury resort featured in Trailhead challenges and Agentforce NOW workshops […]
Hello, Awesome Admins! I’m excited to tell you about how we’re improving Setup with the power of Agentforce (pilot at Dreamforce 2025). This will make your life easier by helping with key tasks like managing users, creating objects and fields, troubleshooting user access issues, summarizing Help & Training, and navigating you to the right Setup […]
