One thing we love about Salesforce is that they’re always looking for ways to improve their platform to make it an even better tool. To do this, Salesforce releases 3 major updates in the spring, summer, and winter every year.
Each release introduces new features, fixes bugs, and makes improvements to the overall user experience. Users and partners can count on everything from small tweaks to big new rollouts, an improved UI to backend additions.
The timeline helps customers and partners prepare their organizations for each new release. Before the release is officially rolled out, everyone gets a chance to play with and test the new features in pre-production environments called Sandboxes so they know what to expect when the new features hit their organizations.
The Winter ‘18 Release Notes are a whopping 558 pages and includes awesomeness like Salesforce DX, updates to Lightning, and so much more.
Getting through all 558 pages (or not) 558 pages is a lot, right?
Salesforce makes it easy to digest all the information. For starters, at the beginning of the release notes, there’s a nice overview and a section that explains how to use the notes. The organization of the notes makes it easy to just break off the parts that are relevant to you.
You can also try out Salesforce’s Release Trailhead which covers the big items in the releases and what they’re most proud of – something we always look forward to.
Otherwise, just some simple Googling will give you a good idea of the most important features that other people will be using. When all else fails, sit down, grab a cold beverage and enjoy a nice 558 book (you don’t have to read it all at once)!
Salesforce DX and why it’s so awesome!
Salesforce DX has us geeking out over here. It’s going to be a real game changer for everyone in the ecosystem. In the past, creating new sandboxes, pushing configuration/code changes between sandboxes, and integrating with source control and CI (continuous integration) tools were all pretty difficult.
Salesforce DX is a new tool that allows developers and architects to do all of those things and more. It will making monitoring the Salesforce environment quality easier and will make managing the platform much simpler for everyone. For Salesforce users, Salesforce DX means quicker development times, fewer problems with environment migrations, and better tracking of changes.
Lightning comes into its own
The Lightning updates also have us pretty excited. Lightning has gotten a bad rap, but these updates fix that. Salesforce maintains an IdeaExchange for users, admin, and partners to post suggestions they would like to see in the platform. This Lightning update delivers on things that have been on the IdeaExchange for eight or more years.
We’re excited about the page layout upgrades and the ability to launch flows with actions. For users, these changes in Lightning will help you see when criteria is being met and will make the overall user interface more intuitive.