Introduction

Alan Kay, one of the pioneer’s of computer science, once famously said “The best way to predict the future is to create it.” As Salesforce users, and professionals — whether that be architects, administrators, business analysts, user interface designers, developers or any of the plethora of roles, we all have ideas for the Salesforce platform; with many of these ideas are influenced by our stakeholders and their user requirements.

What if there was a place for us to share those ideas, to create the future, with other likeminded people? What if others have already had the same idea and you can accelerate your idea? Or even what if other businesses in your industry or sector have the same common requirement?

The IdeaExchange is a key component in the Salesforce ecosystem, it’s a place where Salesforce professionals can come together — where not only can great ideas can be shared within the ecosystem, but Salesforce themselves can both see what the community wants, and share some details of their product roadmap.

Ideas

Ideas on the IdeaExchange are just normal Ideas! Anyone with a Trailhead or Salesforce Account can login and post an Idea. You can think of Ideas as product feature requests — something within the Salesforce Platform (or even Salesforce Ecosystem, e.g Trailhead) that you think could be improved.

Ideas are publicly visible to other users of the IdeaExchange to upvote and comment on (and even downvote). Ideas are also visible to the Salesforce product teams. Similar Ideas can be linked together and even merged.

Prioritisation

The IdeaExchange has existed for well over a decade and has captured more than 85,000 ideas. However, they can’t all become product features. So how do product managers decide which ones to develop?

Since the IdeaExchange was created, product managers have been monitoring ideas to see which ones gain popularity and which ones naturally align with the strategic direction of Salesforce products. That hasn’t changed. Ideas that may not have yet risen to the top are still spotted by product managers and incorporated into product roadmaps.

But now there’s another way for ideas to make it on to the roadmap. Three times a year, IdeaExchange Prioritization occurs, which bridges the always-on idea posting and voting with the product release process. Introduced in late 2018, Prioritization is a process by which product managers review top ideas for their categories, identify ideas to put on the prioritization list, and then ask the community to indicate which ideas on the list are most important.

Known Issues

We all make mistakes, and we’ve all had the experience of finding bugs in software and systems — every organisation no matter how large or small, and no matter an infinite investment in testing, there are always pesky bugs, glitches or edge cases that slip through and make their way to end users. The Known Issues section on the IdeaExchange is where Salesforce transparently share the status of product defects — similar to Ideas, you can follow these for updates and see the up-to-date status of the defect being rectified. It’s always useful to check the Known Issues site when you spot anything out of the box, that’s not working as expected, before you contact Salesforce Support, as the defect might already be known to Salesforce and a fix on the way — likewise when you raise something with Salesforce and it’s not already a Known Issue, the support representative will likely create a Known Issue and share back the link for you to use to track.

Conclusion

Hopefully the above has some useful information, and has inspired you to checkout the IdeaExchange! For those people like me that are naturally inquisitive it’s great to be able to see what other Salesforce customers are suggesting that Salesforce build, and also when I stumble across issues with Salesforce, the Known Issues section helps understand if the issue I am observing is already a known defect and a fix is being worked on.