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The holidays are just past. It’s still cold and dark, and spring feels a long way away. So it’s nice to know that you have the Salesforce Spring ’14 release to look forward to in the next couple of months, with yet another set of enhancements and new features that can make a real difference for your business.
Our regular release cadence gives you innovation on demand, three times a year; however, to maximize the value of that innovation, you’ll want to plan ahead to make sure you know what’s coming and when. To help you do this, we’ve got a helpful release calendar, and here are 10 key dates you’ll want to keep in mind.
Note: You can get more information on these and other release-related topics by joining the Success – Release Readiness group on our Success Community site.
The pre-release program is one of our hidden gems. Think of it as our holiday gift to you. You won’t get a partridge in a pear tree, but you can get a test environment that already has the new release features and gives you ample time to test and play to figure out which ones are right for you. What's the nice thing about this? Like all the best gifts, it’s free, and you can find out how to access it in our Release Readiness group.
The two main channels for keeping you up to speed on releases are our release site, and the Release Readiness collaboration group. We updated both of those in early January with lots of cool info, including YouTube videos and our release preview – an at-a-glance guide to all the features in Spring ’14. If you want to go deep, we also have our release notes available for an in-depth review.
By now, you should know what’s coming, and you can get your users up to speed too using our special release training. This online training covers all the essential details for using the big features in the release, so you know your organization will be prepared and ready to hit the ground running once Spring ’14 has sprung.
You’ve probably already seen our blog post about the Spring ’14 Sandbox preview, and if you’ve decided to take advantage of it, your chosen Sandboxes will get upgraded this weekend. Like the pre-release program, the Sandbox preview gives you a chance to test new features without impacting your live environment. However, the added benefit you get with the Sandbox preview is that you can test those features using a configuration that matches your production environment.
This is something completely new for Spring ’14: our product management team will be discussing and demoing release features live from our studio, so you'll see how those features work in real time. We'll also be recording the whole broadcast and making it available to you in bite-sized chunks so you can focus on the features that mean the most to you. Again, check out the Release Readiness group for more info.
If your Salesforce instance is on NA1, lucky you – you get to try out the new release a couple of weeks ahead of everyone else. At Salesforce, we’re also in this lucky position: many of our systems are on the NA1 pod, and the Monday after the release is always an exciting time, as we get to see cool new features in the apps we work with every day.
This is when another set of instances -- NA6, NA7, NA8, and NA9 -- gets upgraded. Our trust page has the latest info on the timing of the upgrade, but because it takes only five minutes, you should expect it to be pretty seamless. In fact, for our Winter ’14 release, many pods were upgraded in less than a minute!
All remaining Salesforce systems will be upgraded over this weekend in April. This is also the upgrade weekend for any Sandboxes you’ve opted not to include in the Sandbox preview.
Of course, there’s too much in any release to cover in a single post, so once you’ve added those dates to your calendar, get into our Success – Release Readiness group and let us help you make the most of spring.
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