For new Salesforce Admins or developers getting ready for a Salesforce release might be a new thing. But getting ready for a cloud-based release is much easier than you would anticipate. That being said it doesn’t mean we should just sit back and let the release happen. Now, we should plan our release strategy and master it!
Get the Salesforce release notes
Salesforce makes finding the release notes easy- everything is in one place: http://www.salesforce.com/newfeatures/
Before you get into the 300+ pages of release notes take a look at the Release Preview document. This will give you a good start on the areas to read through and the departments you will want to talk to.
Next up- download and read the release notes. Don’t let the 300+ pages concern you, based on the release preview document you know the areas you will want to read in depth first. I suggest taking three to four passes of the release notes. Mark down the nice to haves, the need to knows, and the features that can be released later.
Attend the Release Notes Live webinar
Here is the link, and the webinar is on Feb 12th- so you have time to sign up. This is the first year that Salesforce is doing an all day webinar and I would consider this a must attend for any new Admin or Developer. This webinar is your chance to see the release notes come alive and hear from the project managers who worked on specific features as well as get their questions answered.
Communicate, Communicate, Communicate!
After reading the release notes and attending the webinar you have a lot of information in your head! So I want you to communicate it! Start talking to coworkers, stakeholders, and users about functionality.
But don’t stop there- talk to the one-million members of the Salesforce community about release features. There are specific groups around getting release ready and tons of people talking about the new features.
One last tip…
I think a lot of Admins read the release notes and think they have to know all of them. You don’t. I still go back to earlier release notes to see what features came out. But one tip to mastering your release strategy is to look at each feature and challenge yourself to think about how your company can take advantage of it. Your company probably can’t take advantage of every new feature, but knowing what features are being released and communicating the benefits to users and stakeholders will help drive adoption and increase useage.
