Top Five Things to Do to Get Ready for Summer '07

The Summer ’07 release is coming! During the first two weekends in August, your salesforce.com instance will be seamlessly upgraded—to find out exactly when you’ll get your hands on the new features, visit trust.salesforce.com for the most up-to-date schedule.

In the meantime, it’s time to start getting ready for the new release! Here we’ve listed five steps to prepare your organization for the new features:   

1. Educate yourself on the new features and functionality in the Summer '07 release 

• New for this release! Sign up for a free trial of the Summer ’07 pre-release and try out all the new features before they’re added to your Salesforce instance.
• Visit the Feature Detail pages on Successforce.com for an overview of what’s new
• Dig into the Release Notes for more detail on new features

2. Check out the highly anticipated Apex Code

• Get started by reading the Release Notes
• Join the Apex Developer Network for access to discussion boards, documentation and on-demand presentations to get up to speed

3. Identify the must-have features for your company
For the major features of Summer ‘07, we’d recommend that you focus on the top 3 must-have features for your company. Having focus on the most important functionality enables you to execute better.
To identify these must have features, ask yourself:

• What is the CRM vision for your company? Which features empower your organization to bring this vision to the next level?
• What are the main pain points in your business process? Which features would alleviate these pain points?
• Do you have customer-facing organizations or processes that are still not on salesforce? Use this new release as the compelling event for extending your success to the rest of the organization.

4. Roll-out the must-have features for your company

• Build the business case for the features
• Pitch these features to executives
• Develop a rollout plan for features that require administrator activation
• Develop an adoption plan and success dashboard

5. Go to dinner – no need to do anything with Salesforce upgrades!