Product & Feature Retirement Philosophy

At Salesforce, we know that customer success is built on trust. We’re committed to providing our customers with visibility into our product & feature retirement philosophy to continue to build trust. We want to share how much advance notice customers can expect and what we include in our communications to system administrators.

Salesforce determines which products & features to retire using an extensive process that includes analysis of product usage information, listening to feedback shared via the IdeaExchange, and direct conversations with customers. Our goal is to continually innovate and apply our resources to areas that add the most value for customers. This can require retiring products & features that consume resources while delivering limited value to customers or that provide value to a limited number of customers. While we understand that product & feature retirements may occasionally impact some customers more than others, we believe that we can best serve our overall customer and partner community by focusing on their collective highest priorities.

As general guidelines, when we retire a product or feature, we endeavor to provide customers with the following:

• Advance Written Notice: Written notice to system administrators with sufficient time before the product or feature is retired and periodic reminders before the retirement date. Note that occasionally, we sometimes accelerate functionality retirement for reasons cited below, in which case, the written notice period is impacted. Given that these notices are sent to Customer system administrators, we require our customers to maintain accurate and up to date administrator information.

• Recommended Alternative: Suggestion of new products or features in our service or from other sources as successors to retired products & features are included in the written notice where available. Some of these recommendations may require additional customer configuration, so in those cases, we recommend our customers take the suggested alternative actions as soon as notice is received.

• Uninterrupted support: Continued support for products & features until the retirement date.

• Respectful timing: We endeavor to time consolidation of significant changes, including feature or product retirement, close to major seasonal releases.

We sometimes accelerate functionality retirement, such as for the examples cited below:

• Essential Changes: Changes that are necessary or appropriate to protect the integrity of our service are occasionally required. In these cases, it is important that those changes occur as quickly as possible. 

• Third-party Software: Salesforce functionality that integrates with third-party software can be retired if the third party’s piece of the integration becomes  unavailable. The pace of retirement in these situations is beyond our control.

Salesforce may change this document at any time at our sole discretion. Any such changes may, without limitation, include decreases in the length of the notice and/or support periods described above.

We post updates to this document on our public website at www.salesforce.com. Updates take effect 30 days after posting on our website.

If you have more questions, contact your Salesforce account team. To view all pending and past retirements, see Salesforce Product & Feature Retirements.