Are you ignoring your Release Update prep?

It may seem overwhelming at first but, when you break it down, and just follow the steps, you can prepare your org for the upcoming Releases.

‍What are Release Updates?

Salesforce is continually maintaining and upgrading the platform.  Every 4 months, they release new functionality, enhancements and feature updates.  

What does this mean for you?

Well, while you may have neglected release updates in the past without any consequence, by not preparing, you’re risking unnecessary and avoidable interruptions to your processes and also impacting the security of your data.

You need to consider the following:

1. Salesforce Release Updates will happen whether you prep for them or not.    
2. Deployment Freezes:  Sandboxes receive the release updates slightly earlier than Production, so work done in a sandbox may not be deployable to production if the release has not been rolled out in Production
3. Technical Debt:  As Salesforce releases new functionality, it’s good practice to do housekeeping on your org and see how you can leverage this.  While there’s a very sensible adage “Don’t fix it if it isn’t broken”, this doesn’t apply to keeping updated.  Why not?  Well, your Salesforce org needs to keep up with the technical strides for security, data protection, smooth and efficient running of your org.
4. Best Practices: for example, Flows have received massive updates that allow us to more efficiently handle masses more data and help you to maintain your org logic and update processes declaratively.  By leveraging the updates now, you save yourself massive overhauls later, and also avoid possible interruptions to your daily operations.
5. Ahead of the Roadmap:  Salesforce gives us information on the upcoming release updates a year in advance.  This helps you to prepare well in advance by testing in your Sandbox.

The anatomy of an update:

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1. This is the Release Update Name
2. This date is the last day you can disable test runs (where they’re supported)
3. This banner tells you that you can enable this release update and, if you need to, you can disable it any time before the date in #2
4. Salesforce provides step by step instructions on how to prepare for each release update.  The number of steps is indicated here as what you’ve already completed out of the total number of steps.
5. Click “Actions” for a list of the steps to complete
6. Click “View Details” for an overview of the release update details

What should you do to prepare?

1. Don’t be overwhelmed by the technical jargon. Salesforce will give you step by step instructions on what you need to do (click 5 and 6 above)
2. Enable the release updates on a recently refreshed Sandbox (please make sure no-one has undeployed work in a sandbox before you refresh), and then do some end to end testing (do the things that you’d normally use your sandbox for).  
3. If you find any issues in your testing, you now have some time to fix these before Salesforce rolls out the updates.  
4. If there were no issues, you can enable the test runs in production and continue testing. This is helpful to check whether any issues arise with the integrations.
5. Once you’ve enabled release updates, you can rest easy and simply wait for the official roll-out to leverage the additional

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Conclusion:

If you have any questions or are still feeling somewhat overwhelmed by the thought of prepping for the Salesforce Release Updates, our Managed Services team are happy to walk you through the process until you feel comfortable enough to rock this on your own!

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