Slow summary of Summer ’18 Release Notes

Summer release is around the corner (June 2 for most of my customers), a tons of quick summaries in the wild plus Jen’s detailed summaries as well. Time to go through the release notes myself and think which enhancements could be benefical for my clients.

Sales Cloud and Salesforce in general

Automatic switching of users who has Lightning enabled on weekly basis. I should like it but I don’t. Previously we had that big screen informing them to switch, now it works automatically. But looks like you can disable it, cool. But I like the „Why Lightning is better“ for specific tasks. And it relates to the new Lightning Usage App, which shows some useful metrics.

New URL format is something most users will not notice and I hope that all custom development we did utilize the right internal functions not to be broken by this change. You are also able to send a link to your console app and it will open the same way you have it.

Specific object search is something I believed a while ago is already implemented, glad to see it here. Plus possibility to filter results even further (we need to update the Search layouts to utilize the right fields). And we also got standard synonyms, so you don’t need to remember whether it is picture or phone for example.

Personalize the navigation bar is something which was possible in Classis and a few customers missed this in Lightning, but not me as an admin, glad I can disable it.

Detailed filters in list views such as show me contacts in specific campaign looks cool. I use report usually, but this is more handy. But why the hell they support only the original Territory Management?

See field dependencies is small detail which might be useful in some cases. Will see whether it really improves users‘ work.

Topics are back.  A new component, which allows you to „group“ records by topics, something a few customers asked for, we usually speak about tags. Always wonder how to keep consistency, but that’s another question.

Surveys got some updates such as logic. You should be aware that you can create one survey for free, additional costs extra (unless you have Health cloud).

Einstein Forecasting (need to be enabled), which doesn’t depend on amount and stage only but use historical data (you need 2 years of history) as well. Yeah, AI everywhere, wonder what the difference in numbers can be in typical company.

Send list email to campaign members is finally here and we can send email quickly.

Person Accounts set up in Lightning. I remember how I struggled the other day to find the right page layout only to realize I need to switch to Classic. Not anymore.

Path for Contact – a lot of people mentioned this feature, I cannot see the use case. Should we use it for rating contacts? Or what would be the best use case?

Update depended picklist from path is a huge thing. Typically when you lost opportunity you want to know why and this wasn’t possible with path before. Now it is fixed. Hurray.

A lot of improvements for Lightning Dialer, but as it isn’t available in Czech Republic (as far as I know), I don’t care too much. But would be great to see something similar with CTI products we use here.

Einstein Activity Capture is no longer sold as separated product and anyone with Sales Cloud licence can use it. Cool, finally reason to connect it with Google/Office. Just wonder how much storage it will take 🙁 And it gets Email Insight with it, hope it works with non-English communication as well.

Tasks were improved. Not just only we got a new views (Kanban, welcome), we can split one task into several for each person involved in it and we can have predefined subjects.

Merge fields in email templates now support handlebars syntax and you can have one template for leads, contacts and users. Sounds great. I wonder how much of the Handlebars syntax will be supported, the help is pretty short so far.

Default picklists value looks awesome, as we are now able to change for new record based on some criteria. Would be great to have it for other field types as well (and I don’t speak about the existing situation where you can use just the system properties to drive it).

Calendars view support drag and drop (nice), but the cool thing is that you can redefine the New button with custom component. That sounds super cool.

Duplicate jobs on custom objects? I most likely can think about several use cases for this one.

Lightning Report Builder is generally available, which means we no longer have to assign the permission, but we have a new permission – hide the Classic builder. And we have a new permission to enable Joined Reports in Lightning Report Builder. You can also set the granularity when grouping by date (that annoyed me), rename reports and you are reminded if you leaving non saved report. You can also export report with formating and filter field history reports by new and old values (and it has some limits when it cames to numbers)!

Dashboards got some inspiration from Einstein Analytics and you can link from component to website or Salesforce records – just imagine clicking on the graph of opportunities and not go to the report but to a list view. You can add a new report right from the report, no need to close it, go to dashboard and look for it again. The same applies to report charts – no need to reinvent the wheel in dashboard, you can use the graph you have in the report. Lightning Tables now support grouping and measures. And you can subscribe other to the dashboard.

Plus subfolders for organizing reports and dashboard, more details about them in the list plus ability to change the width of columns.

In Chatter you can mention records, just type / and start typing the name of the record. Downside is, that this post doesn’t appear on the record.

You can rename My Domain without contacting support. It happend to me at least once, that I chose the wrong name and had to contact support and hope they can change it. Now I can do it myself.

Pardot

Pardot got a few new features as well. We are finally able to really delete prospects (needed due to GDPR requirements), responsive prebuild layouts for landing pages and ability to use Salesforce Files in Engage Emails just to name a few which catched my attention.

Service Cloud

Einstein Bots, which can be used to gather pre-chat info and can help to route the request to the right agent more quickly. It looks sexy and you do it in clicks not code way.

Guided actions flow is something which will help you unify process and guide the operators through calls.

Mass Quick Actions can now be used on cases, leads, accounts, opportunities, campaings, contacts, work orders and custom objects. Just hate the limit of 100 records.

Case Comment notifications to case owner or contacts might help both sides to be on top of what goes on. And drag and drop files to emails is cool as well, will it work with Salesforce Files as well (and we can drag more of them)?

Skill based routing for Omni-channel is generally available. And you can also see you work in Omni-channel utility.

Show notifications for incoming messages for open cases – red dot on the tab + blink + change of color. Small but important change to make the agents‘ experience better.

Live Agent chats now use Files to store files, not attachment. Which means we can preview the file and a few other minor things.

Snap-ins now support creation of cases when no agent is available, instead of the simple „we are offline“ message. You can also fine tune to which agent the message will be routed by replacing the single „Chat“ button with a list of agents, the customer can choose from. Sounds interesting, not sure how it can work in real life, but sure they are customer who will love it. And show customer’s place in line to show them how quickly they can be the next one, is interesting idea as well, just enable it.

Service Cloud Mobile – a new app you can use on your mobile phone!

Field Service

It is pretty obvious, that this product is still pretty young. Automatic creation of work orders for maintenance plan (good bye custom solutions with process builder/flow), path, better integration with knowledgebase, criteria-based sharing rules, communities support, better dispatcher console, change currency ISO code on time sheets, bar code scanner, product from multiple locations, multiple signatures on service reports and FILTER RELATED LISTS on Service Reports. Holly shit, we want this in other clouds as well! (and not on service reports but on related lists :-))

Einstein Analytics

This cloud is getting better and better. I could see a bits of it on the camp fire, the summer release is a full of great things as well.

I really like the Conversational Exploration and had a great chat about it the other day – should reports be prepared by IT/BI department or should they be done by users? This feature clearly answers the question as it is a super easy way for end user to get answers for their questions. Still in beta, but already powerful.

Graphs types are sorted differently (grouped by types), which can be handy for less experienced users. Customize Compare Table columns aliases are great to improve the readability of your „code“.

Conditional formating made easy with clicks not code and not just based on measures but also dimensions. Gradient coloring supported, not sure it will be useful. And you can use SAQL to define conditional formating on multiple columns – that’s cool.

Pages are generally available and you can have 20 of them per dashboard. When I saw what’s possible to achieve with them – just wow, they make really nice dashboards.

Specify default fields for dataset, that will appear in table whenever you use this dataset.

Reverse the order of the legend looks like funny new feature, until you have a graph sorted descending and then you realize, how cool it is.

New Connectors – welcome SAP Hana, Microsoft Azure SQL Data Warehouse. Plus you can connect to 100 objects (up from 50). Plus you can setup different replication schedules and run more dataflows (40 per 24hours).

Dataflow Append can do disjointed schema append so you can append tables with different number of columns (and be sure you have the null handling set as you need).

Append data in recipes – just imagine you have multi-org and you want to combine all the data into one dataset to see the overall numbers. Plus ability to map the fields manually.

New templates so you can easily create a common dashboards – quote analytics, snapshot analytics, change analytics, adoption analytics, fundraising analytics and waterfall analytics.

B2B Marketing Analytics combines data from Salesforce, Pardot and Marketing Cloud (paid add-on).

Community Cloud

Progressive Rendering is one of the best for me – you can specify which component on the page is the most important one and it will be rendered first.

You are (finally) able to save navigation and tile menu as draft and not publish it right away.

CMS Connect is generally available and you can use named credentials to connect to it.

We have a new components – recommended actions and offers and paused flows. The later one is super cool as you can user Flow to drive users through some process and you can set up some pause points in it, where users can pause until they decide to move on.

Different Login Policies sounds like a must to me, still in beta. But you can relax your requirements for communities.

Passwordless – just enter your login name, wait for verification code on your mobile phone/email and enter that. Sounds great to me.

Sharing Sets for everyone – at first it looks like Sharing Sets offer limited functionality compared to Sharing Rules, but when you look better there are use cases which are better solved with Sharing Sets. Till know they were available only for Customer Community, now (in beta) you can use it for Partner Community as well as Customer Community Plus. And you can use it even if you have Contacts with Multiple Accounts enabled, but this is a pilot feature.

Tighter integration with Marketing Cloud – now you can use data from communities in Journey Builder to send emails to users who posted something, haven’t been active for a while and much more.

What is awesome is, that you can check your community stream right in Salesforce, no need to switch to community and back. Oh yeah,

Files and Libraries supported and really sexy. Why don’t we have it in Sales Cloud as well? And you can also preview Quip files.

More for developers

With the GDPR in full force it is good to know, that there is an APEX method obfuscateUser, which completely anonymize the user data.

Lightning Flow is supported in Essentials and Professional editions, which makes me think more which customers really need Enterprise.

Local Actions in Flow are generally available makes it easier to connect to your local systems or do other things (toast message anyone?).

Stages (why don’t just use the word Path we are used to?) are available in Flow. The push to really use flows to guide users through complex processes is so obvious. The only problem is that there is no component to visualize it and you need to write your own. The great part is (compared to Path) that you can dynamically change the number of stages.

We can debug flows!

And we can control who will get error emails from flow and process builder plus org name is included in those emails.

Also the errors users get when process or flow fail are more meaningful and they even get the real error (such as custom validation fail).

Enable Debug Mode for Lightning Components only for users who need it.

Lightning Navigation API so you can navigate right to your component (Keir Bowden already blogged about it).

Switch statement is probably the biggest thing in APEX. Welcome simplified code.

The Count() function in SOQL in APEX count towards the limit only as the number of returned rows. Wish the same for SUM, MAX, MIN and AVG.

You can use Custom Metadata Types in validation rules. No more hard-coded values!

APEX code can be up to 6MB and Debug log up to 5MB – awesome.

Salesforce Shield

The changes look small, but I’m sure important. Support for Einstein Analytics, duplicated rules, change data capture, rich text fields, custom objects and much more. I think we have just one customer in Czech Republic, who bought this extension, so I don’t care more, but looks like a lot of things are being solved with this release.

New structure of Release Notes

The change is small, but you will notice it. Before there was just info what is new, now there is also info why and who will appreciate it. It really great, because you don’t have use case for a lot of features, but when you can learn why it is important to someone, you understand that feature better. Thank you Salesforce!

Still don’t have enough? Check the whole Release Notes, there is also Summer ’18 trailmix and Salesforce prepared a presentation with key features including demo videos.

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