The Summer ’20 Release is coming our way, but it is safe to safe, it has been a crazy couple of months to start 2020…
Salesforce has even had to shuffle the offical release date, allowing for a little bit extra time for business, admins and the to get to terms with the large-scale affect COVID-19 has had.
But as they say, ‘the show must go on’.
And today, the Salesforce’s Summer ’20 Release Notes have now been published, we can now dive under the hood to see what the top features are!
Summer ’20 Release: Timeline
May 4th – Release notes are published
May 29th – Sandbox refresh deadline/cutoff date, to ensure your sandbox gets early access to Summer ’20 features. You can use the Sandbox Refresh Calculator to help you check your sandbox environments.
June 12th & July 10th – Some early access instances of Salesforce will get the Summer ’20 release.
July 17th-18th – Most Salesforce environments will get the release over this weekend.
Top Features of Summer ’20 Release
Historically, Summer releases from Salesforce tend to generally focus on the usability side of the equation.
Summer ’20 seems to also fit that mould, with a large focus in Sales/Service Clouds on general productivity improvements to improve how users can interact with Lightning… So here are some of the top features coming our way.
Sales Cloud
Opportunity Scoring has some general improvements, increasing consistency and only display access to Scoring Factors a user has access to.
Some general tweaks to Opportunity Splits, Territory Management and ability to create Orders without Pricebooks
Additional Email Insight now available, showing if a customer has indicated they are ‘Not Interested’
Email Insight showing customer is ‘Not Interested’
And lastly, Record Detail now available while using Kanban view:
Record Details available in Kanban view
Service Cloud
Service Cloud also gets a number of updates to its feature list:
Related Record lookup, allowing agents to navigate up to 2 levels of record relationships within Salesforce. (ie directly access the Account of a Contact, which is linked to a case).
Knowledge Sharing (available in beta). Allowing you to define sharing rules like standard/custom objects in Salesforce, instead of via Data Categories.
And, Einstein Recommended Response is now Generally Available:
Einstein Replies in Summer 20, now ‘Generally Available’ and out of Beta.
Salesforce CMS
A number of new features are coming out way, if you are a Salesforce CMS user, including:
And Split View, is now available for objects outside of Tasks/Events/Calendar…
Lead with Split View
Flow, Flow, Flow
And finally, deserving of its very own section… Flow!
After receiving a fair amount of attention in Spring 20 Release, Flow continues to push the boundaries between Admin versus Developer!
One-Stop Shop for Automation: Starting a Flow
As part of the change, the trigger points for a Flow have been brought ‘in-house’. No longer requiring a trigger/apex or Process Builder to start the flow.
Along with being able to start Flows directly, and Admin can also choose if they are run before or after a record has been created or edited!
For example, this would allow you to update field values on the record BEFORE it is saved to the database. Need to override a specific field when criteria is met? You can now do this via Flow!
You can now configure how/when a Flow starts, within Flow Builder.
Admins, can also configure a flow to start directly if a Platform Event is received.
To also recognise these changes, you can also use the Flow Wizard to select the new ‘type’ of Flow:
New Flow Templates in Salesforce, as part of Summer ’20 Release
Debugging a Flow, gets a little easier too. With the ‘Rollback Mode’, allowing you to undo any record changes that were made as part of debugging a Flow:
Flows: Now with Rollback Mode
And Flows now also have the ability to run, as a ‘System User’.
One use case for this would be to allow the Flow to ignore Sharing Rules within your org.
‘System Context’ now available in Flow! Use with care…
I can’t wait to get my hands on some of these Flow improvements!
What are your favourite features?
With the Summer 20 Release fast approaching, share in the comments below what you are looking forward to the most…
For most of us now, the holiday season is behind us, and Salesforce Spring ’20 Release is almost here. With less than a month to go, let’s take a quick look at the latest release from Salesforce.
When is Spring 20 release scheduled?
For most environments globally, you can expect Spring 20 release on the weekend of Feb 14th 2020.
To check the date and schedule time of the release for you specific org, you can check the Maintenance Calendar. Just scroll through the list and check your Salesforce instance against the release dates listed in the calendar.
Top Features of the Spring 20 Release
In the Salesforce release cycle, it is the Spring releases which typically deliver refinements and usability improvements. And Spring 20 is no exception.
Let’s jump in and take a look at what is coming out way.
Opportunity Scores using Einstein Opportunity Scoring
Spring ’20 Release will see Salesforce start to roll out some of Einstein features at no extra cost for existing Sales Cloud users.
Introducing Einstein Opportunity Scoring!
It is a nice way to get a bit of a taster, of the benefits Einstein AI can bring to your org.
Spring 20: Einstein Opportunity Scoring now available for free
Einstein Voice Assistant (Beta)
While we are talking about Einstein, Einstein Voice Assistant is now also available to customers in beta.
You can create specific skills for use with Einstein Voice Assistant, or use default ones such as: Log a Call, Create Contacts or Update Opportunity.
To watch a video overview of Einstein Voice Assistant in action:
Einstein Voice
Einstein Voice Assistant
Merge Cases
One thing which has been missing from ‘out of the box’ Salesforce for a very long time – yet offered on a lot of other service ticketing platforms (like Zendesk) – was the ability to merge cases.
We saw the beta release in Summer 19 release. But it is now promoted to ‘generally available’, meaning it is ready for prime time now!
It has been a few years now, without the ability to create a new record and pre-populate field values via a custom button and the URL (often referred to as URL hacking in the Salesforce community).
The only way was a Quick Action, and prepopulating the fields via the Action Layout.
But now, Salesforce has created a way to recreate this Admin favourite way of creating a new record with values pre-populated.
Admins: Read more here on how to create a button/link using this new feature.
For developers out there, this is also accompanied by a change to the way to you create/navigate in your components, with new lightning/pageReferenceUtils module and lightning:pageReferenceUtils Aura component. Although this won’t be available in LightningOut/Lighting Communities.
Devs: Read more here re: Navigate Users to a Record’s Create Page with Default Field Values
Change Lightning Experience with the Lightning Extension for Chrome
Salesforce, in Dark Mode? Yes please!
As part of Spring 20, Salesforce has published a Chrome extensions allowing users to take advantage of a few new UI features, such as Dark Mode, Link Grabber and Component Customisation.
No doubt, this is the start of new user specified customisations you can allow and enable for your users who want it…
Spring 20 Release: Settings for Lightning Extension for Chrome
Clone Objects and Related Records
Cloning records helps speed up the creation of new records, but when you have to then recreate child records – you aren’t saving that much time.
Classic previously allowed certain records on certain objects to be cloned with their child records. Like Opportunities with Products, for example.
But Lightning will see this new Clone with Related available across more objects, and allow you to pick and choose which related records are relevant to your new record.
While not the most obvious of changes when reading the release notes, behind the scenes Winter ’20 Release brings new Salesforce Mobile App which aligns the mobile experience with Lightning Experience on desktop. Let’s take a quick look at what you can expect, and how to make the transition a smooth one for your users.
Why the change?
The short answer is, that Salesforce1 (or Salesforce Mobile) hasn’t changed much since it was released in late 2014.
The slightly longer answer though adds a bit more nuance. After Salesforce1 brought in a new way of navigation and accessing your data, Salesforce then turned its focus to building out a new desktop experience, which ultimately led to Lightning Experience.
Before this, users were able to use the Salesforce1 app via their desktop instead of using what is now referred to as Salesforce ‘Classic’ UI. The main benefit of this was to test how something would look on Mobile or to use it via browser on an iPad or similar device.
But with Lightning Experience, Salesforce has had its hands full migrating all products and features over, and ensuring improvements were delivered. Certain elements were similar across mobile and desktop now, so there wasn’t a huge need to update/refresh.
That was until late last year, when Salesforce and Apple announced a strategic partnership. With the partnership aiming to integrate voice commands (ie Siri) with Salesforce Mobile and rollout a Salesforce SDK for developers, which integrates with Swift (the preferred programming language on Apple devices).
Introducing the new Salesforce Mobile App
And so, here we are – with a new Salesforce Mobile App heading our way.
The primary focus of the app appears to integrate the mobile vs desktop experiences further. This will allow for more admin control over what is made available to users, with mobile navigation introducing the App Launcher:
App Launcher coming soon to new Salesforce Mobile App.
Key improvements to navigation:
Navigation Bar at the bottom of screen will now feature Favourites, Search and Notifications . This is a change from the global / quick actions.
App Launcher finally appears on Salesforce Mobile. Allowing users to select standard/custom apps, and display the related tabs.
Personalisation of Nav Bar, will be reflected for users on Lightning Experience (aka Desktop) and Mobile App.
What other changes are coming?
Changes to Page Layouts are also included, and now the same page will display for Lightning Experience or Mobile App. Admins will only need to create one page now.
What does this mean in the real world? It means you will have control to hide components which don’t make sense on either desktop or mobile experience.
Voice Commands
“Hey Siri, show me my dashboard.” and now Siri will actually listen… With the new Salesforce Mobile App opening up your dashboard page.
The new Salesforce Mobile App will also (and obviously) tie into the recently announced Einstein Voice and Einstein Platform Services, which will allow users to dictate notes, get Einstein recommended updates, etc on Apple/Google/Alexa devices.
What do you need to do?
This new mobile experience is opt-in, so even if users get the new mobile app – from the App Store/Play Store – without the new permissions, they will not experience any changes.
Salesforce has given control to admins to prepare for the transition, similar to Lightning Experience Transition.
From a high level, Salesforce recommend the following steps:
Key take-away here is Admins can specify users access to new Mobile Experience, allowing you to test out new pages/apps/etc before general rollout to your users
This should become available globally, starting from October 14th 2019. Users will
Additionally the new User Permissions will be available as part of Winter ’20 release, which should be rolled out globally (for majority of orgs) by the 14th October.
It’s that time of year again, with the Winter ’20 Release approaching. And with each release, there are a number of Critical Updates. In addition this release highlights a number of products are also inline to be retired over the coming year.
Let’s take a look at what these important updates are and how to prepare for the transition.
Critical Updates: Know the impact
Every release has a number of Critical Updates. These allow admins/developers to plan for a change to the platform by giving some control over when the update is released.
Background: What are critical updates?
For example, as an Admin/Developer you can choose to activate a Critical Update before its planned activation date. For example, this means if you have a sandbox environment you can choose to activate the update and test any impacts on your org.
These updates can be many and varied, some with limited impact (if any) to end users, for example by updating how HTML code is handled/displayed to a user.
Other updates, will have a very noticeable impact. Like the upcoming Lightning Experience critical update.
Winter ’20 Release: Critical Updates
Let’s take a look at the some of the highest potential impact updates coming our way. These are Updates which are ‘enforced’ by Salesforce in this release… Meaning they will be activated automatically as part of Winter ’20 release.
Lightning Experience for Users
Who will this impact? This one will automatically impact users who have the ‘Lightning Experience User’ permission.
Even Astro loves Lightning Experience…
They may have this permission because they are:
allocated to a Standard Profile (these are the ones you can modify that ‘come with Salesforce’)
a Custom Profile which was cloned from a Standard Profile after Winter ’16 release,
have a Permission Set which includes the ‘Lightning Experience User’ permission.
When? Salesforce will activate this Critical Update is globally throughout October.
The Lightning Transition Assistant, will also help give you information specific to your org on the transition. And will include things like what likely wouldn’t work in Lightning, which profiles are ready to go, etc./
Also, keep in mind that users will be able to still switch between Lightning and Classic. So that is a small grace, if you need it. But note that Users will be automatically switched back to Lightning at the start of each week.
Security Updates for Email and HTTPS Connections
What is the change? From a high level, these updates improve the general security and functionality of Email and how your browser connects with Salesforce.
Specifically, there are a number of updates to take note of:
Who will this impact? All Salesforce orgs, with users and API connections potentially impacted.
For example, the TLS 1.2 changes may impact users with old browsers. While the update re: DKIM Key is used as a way to potentially avoid spam filters in email clients.
When? As part of Winter ’20 release (throughout October). You can check the specific date for your org by going into “Critical Updates” in your Setup menu.
What you can do to prepare: Review the release notes above. Most of these changes shouldn’t require a ‘heavy lift’ from admins.
Note re: the TLS 1.2 change, a quick review how users are connecting currently should confirm they are using modern browsers. If you remember the TLS 1.0 deactivation, the steps would be very similar here. Users on current browsers should be fine – and API connections which are ‘hard coded’ to use TLS 1.1 may not connect once update is activated.
API Only Users Can Access Only Salesforce APIs
Who will this impact? Any user which has the ‘API Only User’ permission. This update ensures that these users ONLY can access Salesforce via API, and not via UI.
When? As part of Winter ’20 release.
What you can do to prepare: This one is probably the simplest. If you have a user which is impacted and they need more access – an Admin can update their permissions to not include the ‘API Only User’.
A note for Admins: Other Critical Updates
There are a number of Critical Updates, and each org is different, this means high impact updates for your environment may not be covered here. So it is recommended that you check the release notes for a full overview of all Critical Updates.
Caution: Product Retirement Ahead
Over the coming year, we see three products entering the ‘transition to retirement’.
The good news is, two of these products have direct replacements/upgrades available – so if you are still using them, you can start to plan your transition now.
Original Territory Management Is Being Retired
The first product on the list, is the Original Territory Management module (or Territory Management v1.0).
Salesforce launched the beta of Enterprise Territory Management in 2014. and has been adding new features and functionality to Enterprise Territory Management (Territory Management v2.0) over the last few years.
It has now been built into a more advanced version for managing territories, and ties exclusively into Collaborative Forecast module (and in turn Lightning Experience).
When?
As part of Summer ’20 release next year, which is likely to be around May/June 2020.
Why?
As Salesforce are pushing the Lightning Experience Transition, starting with this release (see above). They are clearly taking the opportunity to retire the Original Territory Management and Customisable Forecasting (see below) – and give an additional reason for users on the older products to upgrade and switch to Lightning Experience.
Admin actions:
Simply put, if you are still using Territory Management 1.0, now is the time to start planning your upgrade to Territory Management 2.0.
Also, there is a key step when you are ready to transition where you may need to contact Salesforce Support to ensure users don’t lose access to old data as part of the migration. Read more here.
Note: If you are using Customizable Forecasts (see below), you will need to plan the update to Collaborative Forecasts at the same time as the modules are dependant on each other.
Customizable Forecasts Also Entering Retirement
Other than being spelt the American way, the time has also come for Customizable Forecasts.
Much like Enterprise Territory Management, there have been countless improvements made to Collaborative Forecast module over the last two years.
I remember a time when it couldn’t even handle custom fiscal years! And Quotas were only able to be entered by API/Dataloader until recently.
But the key here again, is that it ties exclusively into Enterprise Territory Mangaement (TM 2.0) and of course Lightning Experience…
When?
As part of Summer ’20 release next year, which is likely to be around May/June 2020.
Admin actions:
Now is the time to start planning your upgrade to Collaborative Forecasts.
If you are using Original Territory Management, you need to also plan the update to Territory Management 2.0.
The final ‘old horse’ being putting out to the retirement pastures soon will be Data.com Prospector and Clean.
With GDPR forcing a rethink of how data is managed and processed. The offering for Data.com become quite limited in certain territories (specifically in the UK/EU).
Additionally, a change to licensing from D&B / etc, has meant changes to the product where inevitable.
Salesforce has worked with a number of data providers to package and distribute what is now coined ‘Lightning Data‘ via the Appexchange. This now also gives you access to additional products and services, and no doubt more will come online over time.
When?
Depends on your contract, Salesforce will essentially stop renewing this product as part of your subscription.
And the products will be retired in July 2020.
Admin actions:
You can read the FAQs here, and if you use the service your AE will likely be in touch to discuss options as part of the renewal process.
The main actions for Admins will be to prepare reports/workflows/apex/etc to stop using Data.com specific fields. You can read the Salesforce guide here.
For most orgs, there is less than a month left for the Winter 2020 Release from Salesforce. Are you release ready? In this post we will cover the top features of the Release and confirm release dates for the Winter 2020 Release from Salesforce.
Winter ’20 Release: Note for all Admins
Let’s talk Lightning Experience migration before we look at the features coming your way…
From October 2019 Salesforce is going to start to migrating all orgs globally to Lightning Experience by default for all users who are “Lightning-enabled”.
No doubt, this is the start of Salesforce’s push for all customer’s to use Lightning and is a good opportunity to prepare and migrate if you haven’t already.
Who are “Lightning-enabled” users?
This update applies to users who have the “Lightning Experience User” permission.
By default this includes all users with standard profiles.
Additionally any users with custom profiles or permission sets that have the Lightning Experience User permission enabled.
It is worth noting here, that any custom profiles created before Winter ’16 don’t include the Lightning Experience User permission. Though starting with Winter ’16, custom profiles that were cloned from a standard profile inherited the user permission, but admins can edit the profile to disable the permission.
Can users still switch back to Salesforce Classic?
Yes, if permissions on the profile allow. Remember, as admins you can limit the ability of users to switch back to Classic via profile/permission set.
Though once a week, Lightning–enabled users who are working in Salesforce Classic are automatically logged in to Lightning Experience. These users can switch back to Salesforce Classic as needed.
Read more on via the release notes here. And if you would like assistance, CirrusRed Consulting can help you with this transition, so contact us.
Winter ’20 Release Top Features for Sales & Service Cloud
Einstein Forecasting and Quarterly Forecasting
Einstein Forecasting supports for Quarterly Forecasting is now out of beta and generally available.
Einstein Forecasting now supports Quarterly Forecasting (Winter 20 Release)
As part of Winter 20, you will now be able to also share Knowledge Articles across more Support Channels (Social Customer Service, Chat, or Messaging), helping to reduce time your agents when resolving cases.
These two vital objects have now been extended and as of Winter ’20 release can now support custom fields, triggers, workflows.
The benefit here is you can now modify these objects (which were very limited previously) to fit your specific business processes.
Account Team Member object now available in Process Builder (Winter 20 Release)
Activities and Tasks
One of the pain points for a lot of users has been how Salesforce Lightning manages the Activity Timeline on a record page. Specifically older archived tasks.
There are three productivity improvements in this release aimed to improve sales and service productivity within Lightning.
Mark as Complete in Single Click
A very simple improvement, but one that should save end users a lot of extra clicks each day. You now have the ability to Mark as Complete, tasks from the various Task list views.
Additionally, the Load More Activities button has been removed. Instead Activities are now grouped into monthly periods to organise and view past activity:
Get ready for the next release from Salesforce, with Summer ’19 Release just around the corner. What new features are in store for your org and when can you access it? In this post we will take a look at the top new features for admins, so read on to find out more.
Salesforce Summer ’19: Top Features
Overall, most of the features in this release seem to be geared towards general improvements to the Lightning UI.
A lot of this release feels like it is further ‘sanding back’ some of the edges of Lightning and improving productivity further for users.
The ‘Summer’ release from Salesforce, does historically tend to be more focused on general improvements. And this year is no exception…
Why? Well, keep in mind this is the release before Dreamforce (where a lot of the new and big features tend to be announced). And most of the Dreamforce announcements tend to be piloted/beta released in Winter or Spring, obviously depending on the dev teams progress…
With that said, let’s take a look at the top features for Sales/Service Cloud in Summer ’19 release.
Lightning Transition: Critical Update & Tools
As announced in Spring ’19 release, from Winter ’20, any user which has the Lightning Experience permission will be automatically switched over to Lightning UI.
So as part of Summer ’19 (the last release before Winter 20), there are a number tools and updates to support Admins this transition.
There are a number of tools and tweaks which help, and they are outlined here.
These aren’t ‘sexy’ features, but they will help with your transition if you are still planning on the move.
Related Lists in Lightning
Summer ’19 brings with it a few tweaks to List Views in Lightning.
First up, we have ‘Enhanced Lists’. “A what?” I hear you ask… An Enhanced List will now allow for up to 10 columns to be displayed in Lightning (rather than the previous limit of 4).
Enhanced Lists also allow for columns to be resized… YAY!
A normal Related List (top) vs an ‘Enhanced’ Related List (bottom)
Quick Filters on Related Lists
When viewing ‘all records’ from a related list, you will now have Quick Filters available.
Speed Up your List View Search
Previous releases introduced the ability to search within a List View, allowing you to speed up the process of finding what you were looking for. Though they didn’t support picklist values, only text.
Well Summer ’19 release fixes that, and picklist values on a record will also be searched if using the List View search feature.
Keep the Record Context when switching UI
Another minor but useful tweak, when switching between Lightning UI or Classic (and vice versa), the record context will be remembered.
This means for example, when you switch to Lightning from an Opportunity record within Classic UI – you will now be taken to the relevant record you were on but in Lightning UI (if it is available).
Search Results That Reflect How You Navigate
Another one for usability, how you navigate in Salesforce will be used to present to you the Search results from the Global Search, including any personalisations the user has made to Navigation Bar.
This is quite an interesting tweak, and should help once again speed up the process of finding what you are looking for within Salesforce.
Sales & Service Cloud – Core Improvements
A number of the feature improvements for Sales and Service Cloud ‘Core’, are bringing in a number of features to increase feature parity between Lightning and Classic. And as a result, closes out the list of features not available in Lightning.
You can now enable and setup this object like any other, and create custom fields, buttons, validations, triggers, etc.
Sales Cloud: Quotas Now in Setup Menu (in Collaborative Forecasts)
Collaborative Forecasting has also FINALLY received the ability to edit and setup Quotas for Forecasting Users via the Setup menu. Gone is the need to update and add quotas via API / Dataloader.
Quotas for Collaborative Forecasts is now available in Setup, thanks to Summer ’19 Release
This spells the end-of-the-line for Customisable Forecasting (the earlier version), which Salesforce has also announced will be retired after Summer ’20 (next year).
Sales Cloud: Enterprise Territory Management
Another one that has finally made it to Lightning, is Enterprise Territory Management, with the relevant object now showing in Object Manager within Lightning.
And remember you can also forecast against territories in Lightning too. With Summer ’19 adding a new way to view your team’s Territory Forecasts.
It is a feature that has been available in competing platforms for quite a while, but never the less a very handy feature to clean-up your cases.
And if you have used the Merge Accounts feature, it will look very similar to you…
Merge Cases option, available in Summer ’19 Release (beta)
And the merge wizard allows you to pick the fields to keep/retain as you merge cases together.
Service Cloud: Improvements to Lightning Flows (aka Guided Action List)
Another product has changed names, with Guided Action List becoming the new Lightning Flows. But the change also brings with it a few changes and improvements too.
Actions and Recommendations now available on additional objects.
When will Summer ’19 Release be available?
As we enter May, the Summer ’19 Release may already be available in a number of pre-release orgs and sandboxes.
As per Salesforce’s blog, we have now passed the May 3rd cut-off date for sandboxes to be refreshed to gain access to the preview release.
Production orgs will start to receive the release from this week (May 8th) for some US instances. And for everyone else, we will receive it either June 8th, and June 15th.
And welcome to 2019! Just like that, we have started the new year and are about to hit the ground running with a new Salesforce release just around the corner. Salesforce’s Spring ’19 Release is just around the corner…
First up, apologies for the lateness of the post… It has been a busy few months for me, but I will talk about that in another post shortly.
As usual, we will take a look at what this release has in store and focus specifically on key features of the release which apply to Sales and Service Cloud users.
Lightning Flow Builder (retiring of Cloud Flow Designer)
The new Flow Builder… Coming soon!
Spring ’19 release will see the introduction of the new Lightning Flow Builder. This will update the UI for Flow Designer, making it HTML5 compatible. What this ultimately means, is no more clunky Flash based Cloud Flow Builder.
Particularly, no more annoying prompts to update Adobe Flash in Chrome every 5 minutes! Which is what I think I am most excited about!
Also things have been simplified. No more deciding what type of update/query you want. Do you want a ‘Fast Create’ or a ‘Record Create’?! Well, you don’t need to think about this anymore, as there is now just ‘Create’. Also variables and
You will get this by default, but if you need to switch back to Cloud Flow Designer (aka ‘the old one’) you will be able to.
Also if you use Flow and External Objects, things are about to become so much easier for data manipulation. With Flows being supported on External Objects.
More data… Sort of.
Salesforce is finally, updating the base data storage each org gets. From a measly 1GB to a slightly less measly 10GB.
Of course, you would take the increase. But seriously, in this day and age of Google/Microsoft/AWS offering 1TB or above on generic subscriptions… Why, oh why, is this only 10GB!?
I know I should be grateful, but this has been a bug bear of mine for years now!
Lightning Experience, take note…
There are a number of tweaks and improvements in this release, as always, for things Lightning.
But one thing you need to be aware of. Salesforce have finally waved the yellow flag to let users know that Lightning Experience will become the ‘default’ user experience for your users who have the Lightning Experience permission on their profile (or permission set), or any user on a Standard profile within Salesforce.
These users will then also get moved to
This is now a critical update, and will auto-activate as part of the Winter ‘20 release.
So better get planning now! Check out the FAQ to get more answers about this upcoming change and who it will impact.
Pin the List View you actually want!
I think this was the biggest complaint we had when we switched users to Lightning: “why is ‘Recently Viewed’ always the view I get?”
So now you can Pin a List View to make it the default list view. Or you can Favourite a list view, or add a list view as a favourite tab… So your users have three ways to get to the view that they want now!!!
Transferring Owner of an Account?
Now you can move more of the related records to the new owner, in one quick action in Lightning… Saving Admins (or who ever transfers accounts) so much time!!!
Service Cloud, hasn’t been forgotten…
There are a number of additions to the way Service Cloud and Lightning work better together. But overall most of the additions seem for the Field Service package.
Lightning Knowledge Migration Tool
To help streamline the transfer to Lightning for service cloud users, and to encourage people to stay on the default / generic Salesforce objects. The Migration Tool will now be able to help migrate Knowledge from Classic to Lightning.
Other Service Cloud improvements
You can see find a list of the general improvements being made as part of this release, here.
Most of the items include the changes to flow and processes for Service, or improvements to Omni-Channel in Lightning supporting new service channels. Or the new calendar scheduling feature, but that also applies across the other clouds too…
When will I get Spring ’19 Release?
Some server instances have already received the Spring ’19 release from Salesforce. A handful of NAxx Server instances…
But for the rest of the world, the next two release windows are:
February 2nd 2019
February 9th 2019
To find out when your instance will be upgrade:
please go to https://status.salesforce.com
in the search box, enter your server instance or custom domain
click on ‘Instances’
then on the following page, click ‘Maintenances’
user the Quick Find to locate ‘Spring ’19 Major Release’
Here is an example of the calendar for the EU12 instance:
The first release of 2019 is almost here… Yes, I typed that right, 2019! I was sitting in a meeting today, and we were planning the roadmap out to 2021. It’s crazy to think… But as the seasons change, we hit the start of the three-releases-a-year cycle with the Winter ’19 Release from Salesforce.
Winter ’19 – Snowboarding Astro
Now I have to admit, I was caught a little off-guard by the release. It wasn’t until I saw the new snowboarding Astro in a developer sandbox, that I realised I had completely missed the normal pre-release build up. :-O
Where did the last 2 months go?!
At least there is plenty of time until Dreamforce 😀
Is it just me…?
I struggle to be “wowed” with this release. Now don’t get me wrong, there are some nice usability tweaks for sure. And some additional features which do really help make Lightning a more robust and complete user experience.
But I am left wondering, where is the “Salesforce magic”?
Maybe there is more to be announced shortly at Dreamforce? But what about Dreamforce last year? Where is “myTrailhead” (there is an answer buried in the FAQ)?
I assume the strategy for this year must be revolving around bedding-in the various acquisitions and general improvements to Lightning Experience.
Top Features of Winter ’19 Release
Stepping down from my little soap-box now… And I will admit there are some really useful and cool usability features coming our way!
So let’s have a look at the top features focusing on improvements to Sales/Service Cloud.
Search List Views & Bulk Change Records
List views have received some attention this release, and now have a cool ‘Search this list’ feature. Such a simple idea, but I am hooked to using it now in my sandbox environment.
You can now also do a number of bulk actions from the list view too, such as selecting multiple records and changing the owner. This now brings yet another ‘small’ but useful feature from classic into Lightning Experience.
Enhanced Run Page in Reports (Beta)
Another cool feature – albeit a ‘beta feature’ – is the new Enhanced Run Page within Lightning Reports. You can easily adjust what is displayed in the report, without having to edit the report and re-run…
Also drilling down into a group/column is now a whole lot easier, matching Classic.
Enhanced Run Page in Reports
Joined Reports in your Dashboards
Finally!!! Joined Reports can now be used as components on a Dashboard….
Forecasts
From memory it has been a little while since the last touch-up to Forecasts.
Winter 19 will bring a number of new features, including the ability to now forecast by territory.
Email tracking for your Sales and Service users
In Lightning you can now track email responses, seeing if the email has been opened. And actually displaying this information back in the Activity Timeline within Lightning, presenting this back in a way that is easy to view.
Live Agent Setup in Lightning
You will now be able to setup Live Agent in Lightning Experience. Another small thing, but one less reason to have to switch back to Classic!
Bonus: Flow Builder
So although not technically part of the Winter ’19 it was announced alongside the Winter ’19 release… Early next year (likely Spring ’19 release), we will have a new Flow Builder. Which will get a much-needed redesign.
Removing the dependency on Adobe Flash is a huge benefit and one of the things I am most excited about. It feels like every second day, I have to update Flash before I can then use Flow Designer.
The new Flow Builder… Coming soon!
Wrap Up
So aside from me being a little jaded, there are some nice usability features being added in this release which add a bit more flesh onto Lighting Experience. (And if you haven’t migrated to Lightning yet, what are you waiting for?!)
There are a lot of new features overall to the platform, and I am not sure if it is just the sandbox instance we are using or if it is the release… But Lightning Experience does feel a bit more responsive overall too.
What are your top features? Have I missed something? Feel free to tell me / yell at me in the comments 😀
Resources
Other resources to help get #releaseready with the upcoming Winter 19 release.
Time marches on and 2018 continues hurtling towards summer (or winter for the southern half of the planet). But it is that time of year again where we get to investigate and plan for the Summer ’18 release from Salesforce, which is due to be released to most orgs within the next month.
Additionally, we see Lightning continue to be the primary focus for Salesforce with a number of key new features, as predicted, being included as part of this release.
Release Notes – New breakdown
Firstly, you may notice a subtle but helpful new format of the Release Notes.
New sub-headings in the Summer ’18 Release Notes
Most features and changes included in the release notes, now appear to be broken down into easier to digest sub-headings covering the all important: Where/Why/How/When/etc.
It is a subtle but useful change, given the volume of information in the 478 page document!
Summer ’18 Release: Features Breakdown
As with any Salesforce release nowadays, there are thousands of new features, and narrowing them down to a is getting harder and harder! But let’s dive on in, and take a look at the Top Sales & Service Cloud Features.
1) Lightning Console – To feature parity and beyond…
With Summer ’18 Release, we see Lightning Console pretty close to matching Classic Console, with some additional new features added in for good measure.
Now I know I am cheating in the top 10, as I am going to group a couple of features together in this one… But it will be worth it 🙂
Extended support for Javascript API via Lightning Console.
Guided Engagement with Flow
But the pièce de résistance though is the new Guided Engagement Console feature. Allowing you to combine the power of Console and Flows, to give your users guided forms/scripts to work from:
Lightning Guided Engagement
2) Reports & Dashboards
Summer ’18 Release from Salesforce includes a bonanza of features and updates for all things Reports & Dashboards… So again, I am grouping a few distinct features under one topic here – otherwise my top 10 would just be reports and dashboards!!
First up, Summer ’18 Release sees Lightning Report Builder come out of beta, and become Generally Available. With a few extra tweaks since Spring ’18 also added in!
One thing to note: the user permissions have changed due to the feature becoming ‘generally available’, and this now allows you to hide Classic Report Builder from users, if you wish to…
Lightning Joined Reports (Beta)
Additionally, we see Joined Reports enter public beta within Lightning! There are a few limitations listed in the release notes, but the biggest appears to be having to use the Salesforce Classic Report Builder
Joined Reports (beta)
Get organised: Folders and sub-folders
I have to admit, this one makes my inner Salesforce geek very happy! And I wrote about it in the predictions post back in January… As soon as I heard it was on the roadmap for this year, I have been eagerly awaiting this feature!!!
Sub-Folders, within Folders! OMG! 😀 😀 It is Lightning Experience only – but this has been a pain in the backside of many Admins, since even before I started working with Salesforce!
Report Sub-Folders
Export reports & keep your formatting
Lightning Experience now allows you to export your report and keep the formatting of the report. Simple…
Filter History Reports by Old and New Values
In Classic, another bug-bear of mine (and many others) was the fact you could not filter a History Report by the old or new field values… It would only display them in the report or the history related list if the field was tracked.
This ended up with a lot of reports being exported and then working with the data in Excel… GRRR
Summer ’18 Release will allow your users to search by specific objects, from the global search bar…
Boom!
Dependant picklists and Path
Path is an amazing feature, allowing you to guide users through almost any process just based on a single picklist. But with Summer ’18 release, any dependant picklists will now also prompt users when they move steps.
Group by Topics
Topics are now available in Lightning Experience!
Many users used Topics in Classic, and it is great to seem them ported over to Lightning Experience now.
If you haven’t used them before, it allows your end-users to group and organise records, by a topic. Imagine it like a #tag on Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/etc, allowing you to then search for the topic and get all related records.
4) Privacy (Support for GDPR)
With the upcoming GDPR changes, Salesforce has continued to add in features to assist businesses (and us Admins) to get ready.
Changes to Individual object
The Individual object was a little limited when it was first released in Spring ’18. The object wasn’t like a standard object, meaning access was very limited. And creation of records/etc Apex coding was required…
But no more! In Summer ’18 the object is now a standard object with all the bells and whistles that comes with that – including the ability to now use workflows/process builder!
You will be able to now:
Create custom actions, buttons, and links for Individuals
Create different Individual record types
Undelete an Individual that you had deleted
Use Individuals with workflows or with Process Builder
Make a Users’ personal data unusable
As part of the new privacy regulations, and the ability to request your personal information is removed from a system, presents a bit of a challenge for anyone who has a user record within Salesforce. These could be community users or internal users…. And is due to the fact you cannot delete a Salesforce user record, ever.
So to get around this, Salesforce is now including a new system method ‘obfuscateUser()’ , which will scramble user information.
This one definitely falls into the ‘advanced’ category, as it requires Apex knowledge (or how to invoke Apex via Process Builder/Flow).
And would require planning and testing, as Salesforce is warning: that it cannot be reversed!
Summer ’18 Release: Key Dates
There are a number of key dates you need to know for Summer ’18 Release. So to help highlight what they are, here is a handy infographic from Salesforce. Remember the dates shown below are in US date format though…
What is the release date for Summer ’18 Release?
The release weekend for your org will depend on the instance it is on, but the release will occur on the weekend between the 18th May – 8th June 2018.
The Winter ’19 Logo Contest is now open…. Even though Summer ’18 release is not even released yet!! Salesforce is already planning ahead to the Winter ’19 release. (Yes I did type ’19 as in 2019!!! **GULP**)
But do you know what that means?
For those who want to join in the Logo Contest for the next release, the vote is closing tomorrow! To get involved in the Winter ’19 Logo Contest is now open in the Trailblazer Community.
Winter ’19 Logo – The Finalists
Here are the finalists which you can vote on:
Salesforce Winter ’19 Logo Contest
FYI – voting ends Wednesday 9th May at 12 pm PST, so get your vote in now… #teamsnowboard
