Announce New SFDC Features to Your Users with a Newsletter

In our last article, we created three lists related to new features in the Winter'09 Release:

- Features to Be Implmented Right Away
- Features to Be Explored (at a later date)
- Features you don't plan to use at all.

Now that you've got your three lists, let's tackle the first one -- features to be implemented right away.

Review the Release Notes carefully; many features must be enabled before you can take advantage of them. Once enabled, they may change the "look and feel" of your application. Avoid the flood of questions from users asking who moved their cheese -- with a quarterly newsletter.

I create all my newsletters using Word, filling them with lots of pictures and text. Salesforce is a graphical interface, and your communications will have much greater impact if you include screenshots about the features you're describing. After the newsletter is done, I use the mass email feature in the Administrator Setup section to distribute it.

Writing a community newsletter isn't difficult. If you're stuck staring at a blank page, check out the free newsletter templates available from Microsoft Online. There are lots of clever ideas here. I downloaded several, but ended up only keeping the banner from one of them. The rest is just a one-column document, with lots of pictures included in the mix.

To include pictures in your Word Newsletter, try this:

(1) Navigate to a view in Salesforce.com that shows the screen or feature you want to talk about.

(2) Click the PRINT SCREEN button on your keyboard, to capture your screen image in memory.

(3) Open an image editing application. I use Paint because it's fast and easy, and we're not doing a lot of image manipulation for this exercise. To launch Paint, click Start --> Programs --> Accessories --> Paint).

(4) Press CTRL-V to paste the captured screenshot into the image editor.

(5) Use the toolbars to crop only the portion of the image that you want to focus your readers. If necessary, highlight the area, by drawing thick red borders around it (as I've done with many images on this blog).

(6) Once you have the image just the way you want it, save it as JPG format. Then import the image into your Word document. Right click on the imported image, and play with the border and text wrap settings, as needed.

I recommend that your quarterly newsletter be timed in conjunction with Salesforce.com releases. Inform your users about all the new features that have been made available to them. Include details about all the customizations (custom fields, objects, tabs, dashboards, reports, VisualForce pages, Apex Triggers, etc.) you've implemented since the last newsletter was published, as well.

The quarterly newsletter keeps users informed about changes and features that have been added to your instance of Salesforce.com. It also reminds your managers and executive stakeholders just how valuable you are to the organization. Save these newsletters in a folder archive -- they're handy to have when it comes time to write your annual self-performance appraisal!