Salesforce does three major releases per year which often include hundreds of changes whether they be bug fixes or new features. Staying on top of what is changing is very difficult as the company continues to expand and is consistently enhancing the platform.

As a professional it’s part of our jobs to stay current on what is available in Salesforce and what may change in the next year or few years. I was pretty sure Salesforce would release an updated UI prior to there being any mention of Salesforce Lightning because of the way user interfaces had been changing in other apps for years. I had already been spending time getting familiar with JavaScript prior to lightning being introduced because I figured it was coming. As a developer, you will get a lot more of this intuition as you spend more time in technology.

Release Notes
I usually try to block out a few hours and go through the release notes when they become available. I don’t recommend reading the notes from cover to cover because they’re usually several hundred pages long – instead look for a quick start of look through the table of contents and see if there is anything that peaks your interest

Salesforce has a section in the release notes about how to use the release notes, but it can be pretty much summarized as the previous paragraph. Scan through the docs or use the filters if you’re using the html version and only look at the parts of the platform your company is already using and is likely to use.

Blogs
I follow quite a few different Salesforce MVP’s blogs, and a few blogs from developers that aren’t MVPs and might even be Salesforce employees. If there’s something I see mentioned a lot I usually spin up a pre-release org and give the feature or functionality a try and see if it’s something that could be useful.

Twitter
I am a very avid Twitter user and pay attention to what people are talking about in the month or so before changes are finally pushed to production orgs – usually what’s mentioned a lot by non-Salesforce employees and non-press is what’s going to be used the most and what will have the great business impact.

Release & Readiness Group
Salesforce has a group with details regarding the releases and what they expect to be “Hot” and “exciting” to customers. I’ve had a lot of success finding out about useful features from this group without necessarily having that noise and marketing feeling for every feature or bug fix.

Salesforce Releases Youtube Channel
I don’t generally bother with the YouTube channel and the release webinars as I feel like Salesforce is spending a lot of time fluffing them up and doing marketing. I usually subscribe to them and then watch the video at 1.25x or higher and reduce the speed if there’s something in particular that interests mes.

Also published on Medium.