It is almost that time of year again.  Here in the northern hemisphere the days are thankfully getting warmer and longer.  Easter is now behind us.  As the sun starts to shine through, the time has come to start planning for the next Salesforce release.  Yes, it is time to prepare for the Salesforce Summer ’17 release, are you ready?

Salesforce Summer ’17 Release Readiness

As with any Salesforce release, preparation is key, and the Summer ’17 release will be no exception.  But you are never alone, and there are plenty of excellent resources available to ensure you are well prepared.  Where to start?

The first port of call is to check the important dates for your sandbox refreshes.  This is key if you need to ensure you maintain a sandbox with the current Spring ’17 setup or if you want to ensure your sandbox get the Summer ’17 preview.  Check this post from Salesforce for the key sandbox preview dates.

Getting a preview sandbox gives you invaluable & hands-on access to play with all the new features of the Salesforce Summer ’17 release.

Next stop is to also check the key dates for Admins to consider.  You can view that on this Salesforce Admin page, fresh off the presses yesterday (19th April).  It gives you a checklist of items and key dates to ensure you are prepared.  For example the preview release notes are available from next week (24th April at time of publishing) and will be available from the Salesforce Release Portal.

And another great resource for keeping track of everything to do with the upcoming release is via the Release Readiness Success group.

What to expect in the release?

The preview release notes are being finalised, and it is almost time to jump in to a preview sandbox instance.  What can you expect from the upcoming Salesforce Summer ’17 release? #safehabour 😀

Recently I attended an awesome London Usergroup chat with Mike Rosenbaum, the Salesforce EVP of CRM Apps.  During the session Mike went through our questions covering the future of Salesforce Lightning and the platform.  You can watch the full video of the chat here at Cloud Architecture’s site.  Unsurprisingly he confirmed that Lightning will continue to be a huge focus for Salesforce and as a result the next release should start to see a number of known performance issues being addressed.

During the talk it was also mentioned that a new report builder for the Lightning UX should be coming our way and the product teams at Salesforce are aiming for feature parity with Salesforce Classic over the next few releases.

Mike also encourages feedback via his Twitter account (@mike945778), so get in touch!  If you watch the video, you will also find out why he uses that Twitter handle 🙂

Obviously there are other features planned and another thing I learnt from the chat, there is a published Lightning Product Roadmap which does highlight some of the planned features for the Summer ’17 release.  So if you are chomping at the bit and can’t wait for the release notes to be released I recommend you check it out!

Stay tuned for more once the release notes come out, until then it’s time to get your affairs in order because Salesforce’s Summer ’17 release is almost here!

Update (24th Apr): Now the release notes are available, check out my next post for a top 10 features for Sales & Service Cloud.  And feel free to add to the list in the comments!