Salesforce Winter ’18 Sandbox Preview

It is almost that time of year, the days get a little bit shorter and the heat becomes a distant memory…  Well at least that is the case if you were in the UK this week 🙂  But also the Salesforce Winter ’18 release is slowly coming into focus for us Salesforce people, and this week saw Salesforce announce the Winter ’18 Sandbox Preview instructions on their blog.

Salesforce Winter ’18 Sandbox Preview – Important Dates

As with each release, Salesforce sets a few key dates to allow admins/developers time to either get a Sandbox onto a server which will upgrade to the new release, or to avoid upgrading all together.  So it is important to remember to check if you need to create / refresh any sandboxes by specific dates.k

The blog post from Salesforce gives you some insight into how to check which sandboxes will upgrade/stay the same, so please take the time to read through it.

The two key dates to remember at the moment are:

• BEFORE: 12am (PDT) / 7am (UTC) on the 8th September 2017:

Any refresh / creation of sandbox before this date, will mean your new sandbox will be created on a server with Winter ’18.

After your sandbox has refreshed/created, always check the server location to ensure it will upgrade.

• After: 12am (PDT) / 7am (UTC) on the 8th September 2017:

Any refresh / creation of sandbox after this date, will mean your new sandbox will be created on a server not upgraded to the Winter ’18 preview.  Instead it will create with Summer ’17 instance of Salesforce.

Existing Sandbox Instances:

If you know how to check your server instance, here is the list from Salesforce of the various instances and what action is needed to either keep Summer ’17 or move to a preview instance of Winter ’18:

How to stay up to date, or find support

Every release, Salesforce seems to get a little more polished on how they communicate what is coming… This release will be no different.

The Release Readiness Success Community is a great place to start and have now published the key milestone dates for Winter ’18 release.

Trailhead will get updated shortly with Winter ’18 specific modules, however in the meantime there are a few worthwhile trails about release preparations, which you can finish off before the preview release notes come out. 🙂

And as we get closer to the release date, Salesforce will be running a number of webinars to prepare everyone.  To find the schedule of webinars, go here (redirects to a Salesforce Cloud Services page).

Happy release readiness preparing!  In the comments below, feel free to share which team you were for the logo contest too 🙂  #teampengiun