Salesforce Unraveled – Yearly Releases

Let’s talk about seasons today. And you might think, what has seasons to do with Salesforce?

Well, you might know and I hope you do know, that Salesforce does 3 releases a year; Winter (September / October), Spring (January / February) and Summer (May / June)

Now what are those and what do they do?

Salesforce is very busy, always upgrading, changing, adding new stuff to their system. They don’t do this just ad-hoc whenever they want to. They do this over 3 releases a year.

What do you do then when these releases come out?

There are release notes and normally when there are releases available, you find a whole range of people diving into these notes. They will create blogs and videos on  what does it mean for each of these solutions; what is going to be released and how do you use it?

You have the Salesforce official ones which can be a bit technical. So it is always worth looking a bit further, for example the Admin Podcast or some companies how do this.

Once you have the release notes and you have an idea what they are, what do you do?

You as a business can decide if you take any of this on or not. So, it is not compulsory! And you don’t have to restart your org or any of that nonsense that you can have with Microsoft. It basically means all these changes are available and your admin or developer team are there to dissect the release notes and understand business impact and usability.

Now as you know you ideally do this kind of stuff in the Sandbox first.

Because you really want to test if something new comes out, what is the impact on my business, what is the impact on my functionality. Does it break anything, does it make any changes that are irreparable, things like that.

These releases are really important and you need keep an eye on them.  You want to make sure you always use the best and latest functionality that is available within Salesforce.

Releases and impact on certifications.

The other reason why releases are important is for those of us that who are certified.

Because it means that when the release comes out there will be questions to test your knowledge

Now in the olden days, 3 times a year, you had to re-certify yourself. Over the last year Salesforce has streamlined that process. For each certification you have to do an official re-cert once a year.  There is a module on Trailhead which is a combination of questions and hands on. Complete the module and you are re-certified!

In addition to all the release notes and re-certify modules, every release also comes with a whole range of new modules and badges on Trailhead. Nice and easy for those who want to get quick hands on for new functionality instead of reading long release note documents. And that means as bonus that you can quickly raise your ranger rank status.

Watch the video for some more discussion on the Yearly releases. Enjoy!