Changes

<li>Option Groups. There are many things in CiviCRM that are already configured as "Option Groups". "Website" is one example. When adding an Organization or Contact, and you want to enter data about their website, it could be one of many types: main, work, personal, facebook, twitter, pinterest, github etc. These are defined in the option group for "website". You can modify these to suit your data and your needs. As another example, "Campaign Type" comes defined as 'Direct Mail', 'Referral Program', and 'Customer Engangement'. I added 'Marketing' so that I can do a generic (email/web) marketing campaign.

<li>If you plan to use the CiviCase component to manage the common constituent "projects" or "workflows" and their associated timelines, then you'll need to create your own "Case Types". Look at the existing "Case Types" for reference.

<li>Test and set your SPF record for your domain so that you can use Mailer, and review the docs for [http://book.civicrm.org/user/current/advanced-configuration/email-system-configuration/ email system configuration]

<li>Turn on logging in the Administration console, otherwise each record has a changelog, but there is no detail in the log!