A Spring Fling!

Remember that Spring 14 release we were talking about months and months ago? Well it’s finally here for everyone. Just last week, NA6, NA7, NA8, and NA9 were upgraded. And next weekend, the remaining servers will finally be moved to Spring 14.

The official statement from Salesforce came via email to administrators when the delay was announced back in January. The statement noted: 

At salesforce.com, ensuring customer success through trusted system availability, performance, and reliability is our top priority. We’ve made the decision to postpone the rollout of Spring ’14 to your ### instance with these priorities in mind.

We have identified open items related to the performance and functionality of the Spring ’14 release and are working around the clock to identify, test, and apply fixes for these issues. To give customers the best possible experience with the Spring ’14 release, we are rescheduling the release to complete additional testing.

We appreciate your patience and apologize for any inconvenience this change may cause for you or your organization.

A setback, but understandable. I personally would rather wait for a finished product that functions properly than have the release rushed to meet some arbitrary deadline that they’ve set for themselves. But then it gets a bit more complex because, two months later, we all received the same email again. Now, I’ve been doing this awhile, and have only ever seen one other release reschedule (back in Spring of 2010).

What is is about these Spring releases that are so tricky? My theory is this: the winter release always delivers fast wins from announcements made at Dreamforce. People hear about something & they want to use it right away, and Salesforce tries it’s best to deliver. But then that lets the poor Spring release to do clean up work, and to round out projects that may require a bit more refinement. This is a tall order considering that it’s all coming from the world’s most innovative company, so the spring release gets packed with a lot of tiny nuances that add up to a complex upgrade.

Do you have your own theory on what happened with this release? Share in the comments below! And don’t get too comfortable. The Summer 14 release is just 3 months away!

Full Blossom

Last week, I started to share all the things I love about Salesforce’s Spring14 release, but there is some much that I wanted to talk about that I only made it as far as the analytics enhancements.  Instead of trying to jam too much into one post, I decide to split the Spring14 goodness into two posts. This week, I am hoping to highlight a few other things that I’m excited about in Spring 14.

First up – Chatter Enhancements! More specifically, the new Announcements in Groups functionality in particular is interesting to me. It is definitely a feature that end users have asked for, and I think it has the potential to get very useful, but I’m waiting to see how this one plays out. The ability to have them expire is super cool though, and definitely not something I would have thought of, so nicely done Salesforce. One thing I think it will need is the ability to change the label from “Announcement” to something that maybe resonate better with your users. Right now, that’s not possible, but hopefully coming in a future release. Maybe I just spent too many years at summer camp, but that word just makes me think of

Bloom & Blossom

It’s my favorite time of year – the Salesforce Spring release! For some reason, I look forward to the Spring releases more than any other. Perhaps it’s because I get to start thinking about Spring in the dead of winter. No matter what it is, this year is no different. There are some very exciting things coming in Spring 14, and I’m excited to share my thoughts.

Click for Release Notes

Before you even dive into the new Salesforce features, you run across one of my favorite things about the Spring 14 release – the HTML release notes! Yes, you’ve always been able to be green and read the release notes via PDF instead of printing them out, but now you can easily navigate to the features you want to see & bookmark them. (And as a blogger, I can now provide links that will send you directly to the feature that I’m writing about – total win!)

Let’s Get It Started

New year, new you!

At least, that’s how the saying goes. We often like to start a new year with a list of things we will do more, or less, or better. (I know that I have.) And while I can certainly think of many things I’d like to do better, I also just love the idea of a clean slate. And while every day is a new beginning, there is something special about a new year that gives us all a chance to start over.

I mentioned my Passion Planner before, and even though I’m less than a week into using it, I have become obsessed. Using it has really helped me to find my focus for the upcoming weeks and months. It is really helping me to train my focus in order to help me achieve the goals that I’ve laid out for the year. In our very digital world, this certainly is not the tool for everyone, but the idea behind it is. State your intentions, and then design a plan to work toward those goals.

One of the things that I love most about the Passion Planner is that it help you to organize both personal and professional goals. It allows me to plan out both my runs for the week, as well as meetings with co-workers to insure that we meet deadlines.

And yes, my Passion Planner is already filled with Salesforce goodies – reminders to take release exams (you have until February 28th to get Summer 13 done), dates for Dreamforce 2014, calls with Salesforce friends. And all of these are tasks on my plate to achieve my goals for 2014. It all boils down to something I heard a co-worker say at my very first job – “Plan your work & then work your plan.”

Have you picked your passions for 2014?

I Have Another Bad Field-ing

If you read my last post, you know all the reason why I dislike using the checkbox. And after that whole rant, you may be thinking what could be worse than the checkbox? If you’re a seasoned admin, you already know the answer. The dreaded multi-select picklist.

Now I’ll be honest, at first, I thought these were the greatest fields. They can hold a lot of data, reducing the number of fields on a page. Logically, they make sense to use when categorizing information such as the modules a customer purchases or languages spoken by a contact. The problems come when you start wanting to do more.

To start with, reporting on a multi-select picklist is a nightmare. Trying to write a filter that includes a multi-select picklist is frustrating at best, and more often much worse. Good luck trying to sort by them, or heaven forbid you want to make a chart plotting counts of each of the values. Instead of splitting the count, you end up with variations of every possible combination and your chart is completely meaningless.