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Salesforce release enhancements to your org [at least] 3x a year, where tonnes of new features are distributed across the entire customer portfolio with no downtime.
Some are new paid add-ons but most are just free and ready for you to use. For me, taking advantage of these is getting the most return of investment in your contract with Salesforce.
For example one of the features that I really like is the In-App Notifications. This feature enables you to let your users know something, be it a new feature to call attention to, or the fact that there is a Christmas party going on. This is a really helpful, simple, feature that streamlines communication. Try it!
Cleaning is a constant (not only in spring)
Keeping things simple allows you not only to finetune to reduce waste, but also to enhance and expand capabilities easily and to amend and refactor the existing ones.
With the previous example, that new feature gives the opportunity to remove rather convoluted custom solutions you may have in place. Reduce the strain of use of your limits, clean up and get the most of the out-of the-box as it’s supported, maintained and extended.
In a sense keeping things simple and modular allows you to manage future change less painfully, with minimal impact elsewhere enabling you to focus your energies of bringing value to the business!
“Good programmers write good code. Great programmers write no code. Zen programmers delete code.”- John Byrd
Do you find it challenging to keep up with the release notes?
I’m not surprised, we all have things in the pipeline we want to deliver, then suddenly a release comes!
An antidote to deal with this is to plan ‘in advance’. Build in capacity and time to tackle these new updates. You know when the releases are coming, right? So have placeholders to get ready.
It’s really important to stay on top of the innovation that Salesforce brings. It’s one of the differentiators when you have major releases in any of the products!
If reading gets too much
A picture is worth a thousand words and every one digest information differently, have a little break. What I find quite useful is to revise some of the key feature releases over the product team snippet videos on youtube, it’s great to see the release notes come to life.
To go far go together
Release time should be a fun time! Work with your team, slice the release notes into manageable chunks and share out who is tackling what. That gives the opportunity for everyone to chip in, to investigate new areas and/or sections of more interest.
Learn from each other, present back the highlights and build upon each other’s ideas.
But I’m a solo admin!!! …. That’s ok you may still have some team members that want to help or users and of course, there’s always user groups who will happily support collaborative learning!
Last tips/food for thought
Iterate, go one step at a time, to help your users get acclimated. They have a job to do and it takes time to adjust, don’t overwhelm them with everything at once.
