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.
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:
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!
Assign Tasks to a Queue
Another feature which fits in the ‘why wasn’t this already available’ – and has been on the IdeaExchange for 10years.
But better late than never! And we now can allow a queue to be accessible to Tasks object and allow your users to assign tasks to a queue.
This is great if you have a team which shares work, like a Sales support team for example.
URL Hacks are back! (Aka Default Field Values)
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…
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.
Read more here, including setup instructions.
Official Resources to get Release Ready
- Official Release Notes
- Trailhead
- Youtube – Spring 20 Playlist