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!

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