Your Salesforce platform is like an evolving organism—with every single update release, Salesforce gets smarter, enabling you to develop your environment to be more powerful and garner more value for your business. These are frequent updates—3 in every calendar year—and can often bring some big changes to your platform.

Do you know how the seasonal updates work? Do you know how to properly test them and, perhaps most importantly, do you know what they are doing for the value of your organization? Here are three important things to do to make sure you are getting the most out of your Salesforce seasonal updates.

Understand how the update works.

Salesforce employs a sandbox architecture for its update strategy, so the production level of the platform is never upgraded. Salesforce allows its customers to simply update their environment from the sandbox stage. When a new update rolls around, all the customers have to do is refresh their sandbox. It’s that simple!

Salesforce takes a phased approach to the updates. For example, if your instance of Salesforce is located on the NA3 server and your rollout date is September 9th for the Winter ‘18 update, you will get access to that update at that time, whereas someone with an instance in a different server might not get access on the same day as you.

Make sure it’s properly tested.

Salesforce seasonal updates roll out based on region, and there are multiple data centers per region for a total of 19 in the country. As said above, updates are staggered, so your ability to test might be earlier or later than someone in a different server. Once you have access to the update, the fun begins.

The purpose of the sandbox release isn’t just so users can play with new features—it’s is also so you can test the update against your own existing customizations and configurations in your environment to make sure the update doesn’t break anything. This is especially the case for customizations that use code opposed to configuration-based development.

Leverage the Salesforce documentation.

Now that you understand how the update works and how to test the new environment, the most important question arises: what does the update mean for my business? It’s important to identify and utilize the many resources that Salesforce has made available to you for each seasonal update.

Salesforce Success Community: This should be your first stop. These forums have schedules posted for when updates will go live, and you can browse topics to get answers to any questions you might have.

Salesforce Trailhead: This is the Salesforce training tool. Every release here has a module with a nice overview of what to expect. However, as things might change pre-launch, it is not the only tool you should use.

Release notes: These are compiled for every release. Here you will find in-depth, advanced descriptions of the additions and fixes made for respective updates.

You should now have all the tools you need to succeed in the next update. Are you ready to see what the next update can do for your business? Call 833-SIMPLUS or email [email protected] to learn more!