(From this week's Weekly Highlight email. Click here to sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday!)

It's the "Weekly Salsa Highlight," your quick hit on what's new in Salsa to help get the most out of your online program. As always, check out Salsa Commons for news, updates, and conversation every day.

And allow me to be the first to wish you an only slightly premature Happy New Year! Here's to a great year ahead.

Automatic Upgrades

One of the things we'll be doing to help keep your Salsa account shipshape is automatically upgrading accounts with our newest improved packages on Jan. 4.

The new Email, Actions, and Events tools have each been available for a while. You can add them today in your own headquarters, if you don't want to wait for the automatic upgrade. (And I recommend you do add them right away: they're better.) But those accounts that haven't added them will see them automatically installed next Monday.

Already upgraded these tools? Then like most of our users, you won't experience a thing when we automatically upgrade: you've already got the state-of-the-art installation.

Haven't upgraded yet? You'll see some minor changes in the user interface and some added features to take advantage of. It won't hurt, I promise! All these tools are out of "beta" status and have been extensively user-tested.

In addition to insuring that you're using the best code we have to offer, the automatic upgrade will let us stop spending development time to keep up the older features and invest it in enhancing other areas of Salsa instead.

So, out with the old, and in with the new! It's just the first of many great Salsa improvements you can look forward to in 2010. I'm looking forward to sharing them with you in the coming year.