The Salesforce product roadmap is a popular topic. We know that future features get plenty of attention, from our years of reporting in anticipation.
Aside from the excitement of being at the Salesforce innovation forefront, awareness of what’s coming up in the roadmap will make you a better Salesforce professional. With foresight, you will design and build “future-proof” solutions – ones that won’t cause you to backtrack, nor require rebuilding, and will serve your users for a long time yet.
What are the Salesforce Product Roadmaps?
As mentioned, product roadmaps are published by Salesforce to outline future features. The most recent announcement, “Salesforce Product Roadmaps” are formalizing how Salesforce communicates this information, “a single destination” displayed as a table on the architect.salesforce.com site.
Access Salesforce Product Roadmaps now.
“…a big step forward in making Salesforce roadmaps easier to find, giving you the insight you need to drive alignment through your teams and better plan your roadmap with Salesforce”.
Marc Braga, Principal Architect Evangelist and CTA at Salesforce.
Available Now: Lightning Experience Roadmap
- Lightning Experience roadmap (including, Sales, Service, “Platform” and Mobile)
- Plus, Lightning Web Security (LWS) (under Customization), Amazon DynamoDB Adapter for Salesforce Connect (under Development).
- Filter the roadmap contents based on product area, release, and release status. Release statuses are: Pilot, Beta, General Availability (GA), or planned for a future release.
There is a planned retirement for the current Lightning Experience roadmap that you may be familiar with. I think we all agree the new site is far superior in usability!
Planned: The Entire Salesforce Product Portfolio
Salesforce estimates that 8% of their release items are currently available via the new roadmap. Not only do they plan to upload the roadmap for all product areas, they have said increasing visibility into the roadmap is also on the horizon.
Increasing visibility will mean sharing more information on when features will become available, where, and any considerations Admins need to make to start planning in advance.
Also be able to filter by Salesforce edition, so that you are not sifting through features out of your reach! (or, taking advantage of your investment)
Salesforce Release Statuses
Salesforce uses release status values that are common across software development industries. Time to get clued up on what each of the statuses indicate – in other words, how close each innovation is to becoming reality.
What does “Pilot” mean?
Pilot is the first phase of public testing, involving a small sample of customers, who have opted in/been nominated and are a good fit to test drive the functionality.
What does “Beta” mean?
Beta is the second phase of public testing, this time to a wider, unrestricted sample of customers. Beta features come with a disclaimer that functionality may change between now and general availability – plus, they are typically unsupported or given very limited support.
What does “General Availability (GA)” mean?
General Availability (GA) means that the feature has been formally released. This happens by its inclusion in a Salesforce release cycle (Spring, Summer, Winter). Support will be available, as technical support teams have been briefed on the functionality.
Did you know…
- Salesforce typically ships around 400 items per release.
- The Lightning Experience Roadmap product areas accounted for roughly 25% of the entire portfolio. Think about how widespread the remaining 75% must be!
A note from Salesforce:
“Please note that our forward-looking statement applies to this roadmap. Because roadmap items can change at any time, make your purchasing decisions based on currently available technology.” Read the official announcement here.