With the impending arrival of the Winter 2010 (aka 162 or Winter'10) edition of Salesforce CRM, as with every other release, comes a prerelease org. (You can get one at https://www.salesforce.com/form/trial/prerelease_winter10.jsp.)
Every time one encounters a fresh org, there are maintenance tasks to perform. I usually go through an org (whether a Developer Edition org or a Prerelease version) and do the same tasks, generally in no particular order. This time, however, I wrote down what I did as I did it. Looking at the list, it's hardly in any "best practices" order at all - it's just how I did it.
There's no need to follow every step, and it is not a complete list of all possibilities, but this should give you some idea of the possibilities and available tweaks: (*** indicates some of the new features in WInter '10)
- Save login with 1Password/Roboform
- Reset (Set) Security Token
- Administration Setup | Security Controls
- Session time 8 hrs
- Passwords never expire
- Enable Similar Opportunities
- Enable Opportunity Teams
- Note: Asked to add to page layout. Not asked for Opportunities.
- Enable Solution Browsing
- Enable Solution HTML
- Could have created a Solution Process & Record Type
- Did not enable multilingual solutions
- Enabled S2S
- Set up S2S Connection Finder ***
- Added fields to page layout - Kept read-only for all profiles except System Administrator
- Enable Public & Private Tags
- Separate loading of related lists
- Spell Checker on Tasks & Events
- Collapsible Sidebar
- Custom Sidebar on all Pages
- Enhanced Profile Management ***
- Order of wide section (top down): Calendar, Tasks, Items to Approve, Dashboard
- No changes to narrow section
Other things that may be possible in other orgs:
- Enable Customer Portal
- Customize Campaigns
- Set up Sites
Again, this is not meant to be a complete list. Also, it is not intended to be a how-to; for more information you may search the Help link at the top of every org page, check Salesforce Community, or Developer Force.
Happy configuring!