It's once again that time of year when Salesforce undergoes a major upgrade to the latest and greatest release, in this case Winter '07.

Here's the latest word on when the upgrade will be conducted for North American 1 customers:

"Please be aware that salesforce.com has scheduled maintenance for your instance (NA1):"
Friday, January 5th, 2007 from 6:00pm PST - Saturday, January 6th, 2:00am PST

It looks like NA3 will be on January 12th. Still not sure when NA2, NA4, EMEA, and AP will be upgraded.

Here's what we're doing at i-Dialogue to ensure a smooth transition:

1) API Integration and Testing.
We're currently testing i-Dialogue against the new Winter '07 8.0 API, but we will not immediately switch over to using the 8.0 API in January. Instead, all i-Dialogue portals will continue to use the 7.0 API for up to 30 days after the transition. We will then convert all hosted portals to 8.0 en masse in late January.

2) Web Lead Queueing
Salesforce has been pretty good about queueing web leads even during maintenance windows. As a redundant measure, all i-Dialogue web leads registered during this maintenance time will be stored on the portal server and later synchronized with Salesforce once the maintenance is complete.

3) Temporarily Suspend All Integration Activity
We plan to suspend all asynchronous integration activities with Salesforce during maintenance periods. Security measures are in place to prevent successive failed login attempts from the portal to Salesforce. Suspending integration reduces the confusion between these 2 systems.

Upon re-activation of integration services, the portal and Salesforce will synchronize all custom and standard objects within 1 hour.