Every year, Salesforce releases three major updates to its platform. The Winter, Spring, and Summer releases are planned far in advance, and they follow a strict schedule. Because of this, all users have adequate time to prepare and test for a seamless release.
When Will I Get The Release?
Often times, your individual release date will be determined by your Salesforce Instance. If you want to check your specific date, follow these steps:
- Go to trust.salesforce.com
- Click on Status
- Enter your instance, domain, or MID
- Click on Maintenances
- Look for “[Winter/Spring/Summer] Major Release” in the Subject column to find your date
How Can I Preview The Release In Advance?
If you want to do a bit of testing (highly recommended) before the big update, you can have your Sandbox upgraded in advance. For this, there are often two Sandbox release windows. The date your Sandbox is updated depends on whether you have a “Preview” instance or a “Non-Preview” instance. You can check this by following this guide by Salesforce. If you can, we highly recommend previewing each release to check for compatibility and to make the transition as easy as possible. Once your sandbox is updated with the latest release, you can test out your customizations against the new release. It’s important to make sure that everything is in working order before updating your production environment.
Note: If you refresh your sandbox before the production environment is updated to the new release, the sandbox will revert back to the production version. During any times where the sandbox and production environments are in different releases, you may have some issues when deploying change sets between environments.
Additional Resources
Once you have had a chance to explore a bit, you will likely have some questions. A great resource is the release readiness success community group, where you can find advice from other users and admins. This is a great place to ask questions, find out information on release dates, view webinars, and get ready for the release with others in the same boat. You can also find out how other admins are leveraging new features if you want to borrow some great ideas for increased productivity!
Another great resource is Trailhead, where you can learn how to best prepare for releases. Trailhead offers many different modules to help you learn about different features in Salesforce. If you ever need to learn about something quickly, check here first! When it comes to release readiness, Trailhead has a quick and easy guide to get you started!
What If I Need More Help?
For any questions or concerns about preparing for a release, you can always contact the team at Ntegro! We familiarize ourselves with the patch notes early and often when it comes to releases. This way, we can help all of our customers take advantage of the new features. Contact us online to learn more about releases!
