- Hello and thank you for joining us today
for Admin Best Practices: Preparing for Salesforce Releases.
Before we get started, please take a look
at our forward-looking statement.
This asks that you make all of your purchasing decisions
regarding Salesforce based on technologies
that are available today, and not any technologies
we may mention in the future, that are coming in the future.
My name is LeeAnne Rimel.
You can find on the Twitters @leeanndroid.
I am a admin evangelist here at Salesforce,
and I am excited today to share with you
how you can get ready for Salesforce releases
and get up to speed on all the latest
and greatest in Saleforce technologies.
We love hearing from you,
so make sure to connect with us and ask questions.
I already shared my Twitter handle,
but also connect with us
on our SalesforceAdmns Twitter handle,
There's no I in admin, and on the hashtag AwesomeAdmin.
We also have a group on the Trailblazer Community
where you can ask questions about this session
or any Salesforce admin sessions that you see,
and you can find that at the Bit.ly/AdminWebinarGroup,
those underscores do indicate capitals.
So if you're using the Bitly,
make sure to capitalize the A, W and G.
So please connect with us online on Twitter
or find us on Trailblazer Community
if you've got questions that you'd like to ask.
So today, what we're gonna talk about is,
what is a Salesforce release?
What does that mean for you as an admin?
What are the best places to get hands-on
with a Salesforce release?
What are some steps you should be thinking about as an admin
on how you train your users on Salesforce releases?
And what's a general release timeline look like?
So you can start planning ahead for future releases.
So first, we'll talk about what a release is for Salesforce.
Salesforce releases are how we deliver new functionality
and features to our customers, you.
So we have three releases a year,
they're named spring, summer and winter.
Generally, spring comes around January and February,
summer comes May and June,
and winter come September, October.
That's a general timeline
for when you can expect to see releases.
So it's also good to remember
they come about every four months.
So if it has been a while
since you've heard about a Salesforce release
or gotten hands-on with the Salesforce release,
release time is probably right around the corner.
And during the Salesforce release,
features that have been delivered by our product teams
are made available in your production
and sandbox environments.
We're gonna talk more about what that looks like
and how you get hands-on with them.
But these are brand new features,
or they may be upgrades or updates to existing features
that you've already used and played with.
And these are new features
that are brought to you in those environments.
Now, how do we decide what features to build,
what features to deploy?
We take a lot of input from our community
via the prioritization process.
So I encourage you in the Trailblazer Community,
to go into the idea exchange
and click on Ideas and Prioritization.
And you can actually see what are those top ideas
that have been prioritized
or maybe under consideration to be delivered.
And you can participate in prioritization yourself
as an admin.
So I strongly encourage all of you
when there are those prioritization windows open,
to make sure you participate in prioritization,
we wanna hear from you,
we wanna hear your input about features,
things that you wanna see in your orgs,
because that really strongly factors
into the features that we release.
So every release generally includes
Generally Available features,
Pilot features and BETA features.
And what does that mean?
Pilots are usually the first phase of public testing.
So Pilots normally include
a small subset of participant organizations.
These may be companies that have opted into a Pilot
based on their particular business needs
or if they meet that Pilot profile.
And Pilots can have a varying level of access requirement.
So there's some Pilots that are a very wide open Pilot
that might maybe only require that you use mobile.
But other Pilots might be more specific
to ensure that they're successful
or ensure that they're really testing out the functionality.
So they might have a more specific set of requirements
like type of data count,
like you have to have a certain set of data
or a certain number of data,
or that you need to have
a certain number of like territories or users.
So there's different qualifying criteria
for Pilots to look at.
And so every Pilot is different.
BETA is a phase involving
rolling a feature out publicly for testing.
So BETA features are normally given limited support,
they're not usually considered finished.
And so there might be limited support,
if you were to say use a BETA feature and then call support
or need additional kind of assistance with that feature.
They are something that is
being rolled early for feedback and testing.
Generally Available is where features go,
usually once they pass Pilot and BETA,
though a lot of features go straight to GA.
And they'll be formally included
in a Salesforce release and considered GA.
So these features are considered fully functional,
and are generally fully supported.
So there's all these cool new features coming,
you want to get hands-on with them
and start to see how you would build them
for your organizations and use them in your implementations.
So we wanna get hands-on.
There's a few places that you can test our new features
and get hands-on.
One of those is in your pre-release environment.
So every release in the release communications
that go out on Salesforce admins blog,
on the release group on Trailblazer Community,
which I'll share,
there is a link for every single release
to a pre-release environment.
And it's a Developer Edition environment.
So if you've ever signed up for what's called a DE org,
or Developer Edition org,
you can sign up for a special one during releases
that is on that release.
So this would have a lot of features turned on for it.
You only have like one user,
you can't add a lot of data into it.
It's really just to test building features.
And it wouldn't have any of your existing implementations,
or existing customizations,
it's kind of a blank developer environment.
I strongly encourage everyone
who's getting hands-on with releases
to get a pre-release environment.
There's no limit to how many you can get,
you can get one every release,
you can get more than one in a release.
Just like a developer environment,
you can sign up for as many as you want.
And you can't really break anything in a DE.
So it's a great place
to really explore and test drive features.
Now, you can also get hands-on
with a release in your sandbox.
So if you are using sandboxes
as part of your development lifecycle,
there is what's called a Sandbox Preview window.
So for every release,
there is a period of time during which,
if you refresh your sandbox during that period of time
before the release,
that new sandbox refresh
will be on that next upcoming release.
This is really useful because as you know,
your sandbox will have your existing customizations,
a lot of set of your existing data.
And you'll be able to test drive
how these new features will work
against your existing customizations
and your implementation.
So if you're using sandboxes,
I think it's a really, really good idea
to actually do both, to get hands-on in pre-release,
'cause you can't break anything,
you have unlimited number of pre-release orgs in a DE,
and then to also try to get that sandbox preview window
where you're refreshing your sandbox at a particular window.
We always publish those dates.
And then you're able to test some of these feature changes
or maybe features you've been waiting for,
or upgrades you've been waiting for
against your existing customizations.
And there's other places as well to get pre-release.
These are the two main ones to get hands-on
before the release is generally available.
Some of the trailhead environments
are sometimes on pre-release,
sometimes there's particular enablement steps
that we take people through
if there's different workshops that you're doing,
things like that.
Sometimes there's ways to get hands-on
with features outside of these.
But these are really the main two,
is the pre-release environment and the sandbox.
Oh, and you can learn more about sandbox preview,
it's included on the release trail,
which I'll include at the end.
So let's talk about training our users.
So we're rolling out these new features,
potentially, we want to maybe deploy something that's new
or part of a new build for our users.
And I think it's really important as an admin
to really take charge of training your users,
'cause we wanna train them
not only on maybe changes we're making,
which is the change management
that we're always responsible for.
But also with every release,
there's features that are specific for end users,
maybe they don't require a lot of admin customizing.
However, as an admin,
you're the ambassador of Salesforce,
you're the product manager for Salesforce
for your environment, for your company.
And so I think it's a good idea to always think about,
what are those end user features that maybe don't require
a lot of admin enablement or customization,
but you are in a position
to help point them out to your users
and help them be successful.
So I love thinking about
training your users feature adoption at your company
in a few different ways.
You can do webinars lunch and learns.
When I was an admin,
I used to do lunch and learns pretty regularly,
recording little video series,
pointing them to appropriate trailhead modules.
So if they say,
a bunch of great new features for reports and dashboards,
maybe remind them to take reports and dashboards module
so they can get comfortable with that area of application.
There's also of course chatter
if you do have like a Salesforce chatter group,
or an admin kind of chatter group at your company
where you're letting people know
about changes or new things,
that's a great place too.
And these might be features like letting people know
that they can view their calendar on a list.
That was a feature that came out a few releases ago.
It's really useful for end users.
It doesn't require any additional enablement from an admin.
As far as setup is concerned,
however, that might be a really useful thing
for you to point out to your users
if they're are heavy calendar events and tasks users.
So thinking about what are some of those features
that you can point out to your users
to help them be productive.
So I've mentioned a couple of times the release timeline
and the order that things come in the release.
Let's dive into what that means.
So at the bottom of the green here,
the release goes out on a rolling basis,
that we kind of count backwards from there.
So we can always get to our release,
and I'll get to this on upcoming slide.
We can always get to the release,
kind of drop date on trust,
and I'll share with you exactly how to find that.
But every release, if we have like the release day,
which is the day that your org or your environment
gets all of these new features,
if we count backwards at about one month,
is when you can usually sign up for pre-release.
These aren't like hard and fast dates,
these are approximate dates,
'cause sometimes there's differences by like a week or so
just based on the calendar.
About one month out,
you can also usually read the preview release notes.
So often those go out,
and these are considered preview release notes,
they're not finalized.
But you can start to get hands-on quickly
with the release notes and read.
About three to four weeks out
is when the sandbox preview notification goes out.
So that's when you would want to be
making sure you have a plan
for when you're gonna refresh your sandbox.
And also, that's when we release the release badge.
So for every release, there's a trailhead module.
And that covers specific features
that are being included in that release.
Then usually about a week or two
before the release comes to production,
we have release readiness live.
So during release readiness live,
we have an admin preview and a developer preview
that are gonna touch base on
lots of different features coming for admins and devs.
And then we also have four days
of cloud release readiness live,
So like Sales Cloud platform, Community Cloud.
So if you are a sales service cloud
or a community cloud customer,
it would be really important to attend the Community Cloud
or Service Cloud release readiness live broadcasts,
just so you can see the deep dive
from all the product managers
on the features that aren't being included.
And we also always post on amazon.salesforce.com,
our release countdown blog,
where we have all of these dates included,
to help make sure that you can mark them in your calendar.
I mentioned the trust and maintenance calendar.
So if you go to our Salesforce trust site,
you can browse by cloud.
So depending on what cloud you're using at your company,
you can go ahead and browse and look at
what is the Release Calendar look like for my cloud
and for your org instance.
So you can look up your org instance
and your company information.
So maybe you're like NA42,
and that's where you can go and cross-check
and see exactly what day
you're gonna be getting that release.
So we've got a ton of resources, I mentioned some of them.
We've got our trailhead trail,
prepare for Salesforce releases.
I highly suggest everyone takes this trail,
it's really important.
It's got information on doing your sandbox refresh.
It's got information
on how you should review for the release.
We also have a lot of release content on Salesforce admins.
So if you go to admin on Salesforce.com,
and we've got blog posts, videos, podcasts,
we've got a topic called Salesforce Releases.
And so if you go to that,
then you can see all of this content
from experts in our community and experts from Salesforce
on how to best prepare for our Salesforce release.
And in the Trailblazer Community,
we have the Release Readiness Group.
So for every single release, there's updates,
timelines, questions, posted to that release readiness group
in the Trailblazer Community.
It is a really important place to go for an admin.
They post tons of resources.
It's a good place to post
if you have a question about a release
or something that's being included in a release.
There's a lot of product information in there
as well as timeline and timing information.
And for every release, we have a learn more trailmix,
that is for admins and developers,
and we've got release highlights in there,
and you can find that
at sforce.co/learnmoar for every release.
So I hope you're excited to get hands-on
with upcoming Salesforce releases.
And I will see you on the trail.
Thanks for joining.