Understanding Salesforce Release Management
With Salesforce, your team needs to prepare for release management.
Release Management is the planning, scheduling, coordinating, and overseeing releases and infrastructure changes meant to optimize their efficiency and quality while meeting the demands of rapid growth.
“Think of organizational change management as the captain of the ship, setting the course and keeping the big picture in mind,” explains Perficient’s Senior Solutions Architect for Salesforce, David Schild. “Release management is like the sailors cleaning the decks and checking the sales, making the ship run by only focusing on the task in front of them.”
Release management is the operational process of implementing the technology changes and requires its own strategy that should be built to evolve over time. As your Salesforce instance becomes more integrated with other components within your IT environment, it’s important to understand how any changes might affect you.
How Salesforce Releases Work
Credit: Salesforce
Releases typically fall into one of the following categories:
- Daily: for minor bugs and simple changes not needing formal release management
- Minor: changes with limited impact that still require testing and limited training and change management
- Major: like Salesforce’s big changes three times a year that require more attention.
Salesforce Release Readiness Tools
- Release Readiness Trailblazers Access resources and experts for all things release readiness.
- Release Milestones See key dates for the release.
- Trust Status Maintenance. See Sandbox and other release dates and times. Click Instances and your instance to see your maintenance dates.
- Sandbox Refresh Calculator Plan if and when you need to refresh your existing Sandbox orgs.
- Sandbox Preview Video Learn how to navigate the Sandbox preview process.
- Sandbox Preview Instructions Get early access to new features in your sandbox.
- Customer Success Event Calendar Register for release overview webinars and access recordings.
- Certification Release Maintenance Schedule Keep your certification updated in Trailhead.
- Prepare for Salesforce Releases Use Trailhead to create your release strategy.
- Releases Email Journey Prepare for releases by subscribing to emails.
- Release Notes Your key to understanding the latest and greatest updates and features.
- Release Note Resources Your key to understand how to read the Release Notes.
- Latest Release Website See an overview of the latest release.
- Seasonal Release Blog Go in-depth into updates by following this blog full of great content.
- Release Readiness & Feature Adoption Community Connect with other Salesforce users and plan your release together.
Make sure to also check blogs like this one to learn what our Salesforce experts highlight as the releases come out. We curate the Release Notes to get you the best information first.
Create Your Own Salesforce Release Management Strategy
Have you navigated through a Salesforce release yet? What did you think? Were you prepared? Did you even notice? Let us know in the comments below or by tweeting us at @Perficient.
