If you want to supplement your knowledge of upcoming releases, I encourage you to check out a portal that you have probably used at least once in your life: SFBen at https://www.salesforceben.com/. Ben and his team discuss very well what is in any upcoming release and describe the impending novelties.
Awareness of what is coming in an upcoming update is extremely important. Without it, we could be seriously surprised when trying to create a new process in Process Builder (Flow, I am your father), for example, if an update introducing Flow as the main tool for automation in Salesforce came in. For Salesforce system administrators and developers, tracking new updates is a key element, allowing them to utilize the potential of the latest functionalities and maintain their systems at the highest available level of operation and security.
Preparation for upcoming releases for companies with large orgs is an extremely labor-intensive and time-consuming endeavor. During such preparations, all key solutions in the system are tested on a sandbox provided by Salesforce. Without it, many companies could lose data, time, and above all, money. Imagine that someone took all of your data about your family and friends – do you remember all of their numbers? I do not. I know a few that I would be able to recall. It would be the same in the case of not preparing your environment for an upcoming release. Imagine that Salesforce releases a new data structure, and to be able to convert to it, you need to perform a few uncomplicated actions. But you and your company do not do it, and one sunny day, the Sales department comes in and sees that the data is unreadable and most of the values from various fields have disappeared. Can you imagine that chaos? That is exactly why Salesforce releases a summary of their work and upcoming novelties.
I hope you now understand how important these release notes are before the final release. Speaking of reading, maybe you’ll also write a bit and talk to people who love Salesforce just like you. In the next section, you will read about where you can find communities, events, and much more.