Spring ’19 Release Notes Summary

That time of the year is here again, would you run out of books from Christmas, you can read through release notes. What I found in them and liked a lot?

Top features

In Winter ’20 (October 2019) Salesforce will start switching users to Lightning at all orgs. I mean all, where users have the Lightning Experience User permission which is enabled by default in all standard profiles.

Pinned Lists – we still cannot setup which view will be default by admin, but at least users can pin the most important view for each object at it will be opened when they click on the tab.

Extra data space – this one is big for a few of my customers. The default 1GB of data storage was too low for them, now they can enjoy 10GB by default. Where is that aplaus gif? (will be applied to instances in late March)

New Flow Buider – say good to that old Flash thing and enjoy new, simplified and sexy tool with new features. What about „Additional text input“ on picklists?

Sales Cadence, where you just setup which activities should follow and in which order and Salesforce do all the magic of getting in touch with your contacts. (at extra costs 🙁 )

Field History Data will be deleted after 18 months. The 18 months limit wasn’t enforced till now, but starting with Spring your data field history data (history of changes you made to up to 20 fields per object) will be deleted. You have to buy Shield to get longer history (about 30 % of licence price).

I never really liked Salesforce Essentials, but as it now includes Sales and Service for one price and you can add and remove users, it looks cool. And price is ok compared to others.

New reports screen – the Enhanced Run Page from previous release is now the standard, which allows for drill down, sticky column headers, you can resize columns and have stacked summaries, so you don’t waste precious space on your reports. We also got 12 columns on dashboards as well as compact components, so we can put more info on the same space.

Other features

  • you can customize which links will be under the help menu on top of page;
  • printable view – a few customers asked, how they can print from Salesforce, now they will able to;
  • Lightning Scheduler, which allows you to select times when you can meet with customer and they can choose, looks super cool, paid extra;
  • pop-out items from utility bar. Utility bar can be handy – but I usually have problems to find what should be there as it is really crucial for users – and not you can pop-out these things to another windows and extend your workspace. Just imagine the CTI phone on another screen;
  • add people to groups and queues by territory – finally looks like all the different part clicks together and you don’t have to assign your users at different places;
  • the product list when adding products to opportunities will be more condensed;
  • Enforce Email Privacy setting, which respects when customers opt-out from your emails. Looks like this section in setup is pretty cool and you really should set it up. Plus new Consent Management Object;
  • add attendees to events without setting up Lightning Sync, aka we are finally able to add attendees in Lightning! And other improvements to calendars such as showing more info, using colors;
  • Permission Set Groups – assign more permissions at once and don’t forget any (pilot);
  • switch Lightning Page to other template, no need to start again from scratch (will that be possible for reports anytime?)
  • default home page per Lightning App, not one per org!
  • you can use relative dates in macros;
  • live agent supports offline mode (meaning all your agents are offline and customer can still open the case);
  • Where is it used (beta), so you have an idea where field is used – validation rules, layouts, formula fields, VF pages, … the list is pretty long.
Example page of field references.
  • Login Discovery, so users just enter what they know (phone number, email) and the system redirects them to their identity provider page;
  • authenticate users with certificates for better security and user comfort;
  • asynchronous email verification for new community users, so they can start their use even before clicking the confirmation link in an email;
  • contactless external identity user, so you don’t have to create contact record for each community user. And it also says something about chance to downgrade for another licence (no idea).

Process Builder and Flows

  • you can specify processes and flow in your managed package as templates, so customers can update them;
  • processes can now respond to standard platform events, such as errors = might be easier to handle errors and do some additional actions on them;
  • display images in your flows and capture addresses, which uses the standard country/state picklist values;
  • support for external objects – lookup, create, update. And even launch process, but that has to be done with platform event;
  • Return Null Values in Process and Flow Formulas critical update which makes sure that the returned value is always true – would this solve the ugly need for checking whether all fields in hierarchy are null and just then check the value of the last one?
  • scheduled actions can be tested with APEX as they are processed immediately when calling stopTest();
  • Guided Actions will be setuped in Setup, not on the component anymore. And there is a converter to do that.

Pardot

  • business units in Pardot to segment what users can view;
  • selective sync between Pardot and Salesforce – no more you have to have all contacts in Pardot.

Field Service Lightning

  • FSL can show IoT Data about your product;
  • booking appointments in Field Service Lightning just got a dialog which makes more sense (rather than scrolling through long list of options).

Einstein Analytics

  • Google Analytics connector for Einstein Analytics – now you can get those two together;
  • event based scheduling your dataflows in Einstein Analytics;
  • Smart Dashboard Templates in EA – not only Salesforce provides app templates, the AI is able to generate dashboard and all its components just from data you provide. Scary, especially would it be better looking than my work;
  • Share Einstein Discovery Stories to Quip or R for data scientists.

Communities

  • Translate with Google in Community Chatter Feed;
  • moving feed items between groups, including all replies etc.
  • you can set which options are available on list views in communities – would I be finally able to get rid of those buttons which don’t make sense?
  • Partner Account Relationship and sharing rules sounds interesting and as a way how to simplify the sharing of data with partners. For accounts, contacts, campaigns, cases, leads, opportunities, orders and custom objects.
  • community guests users can now upload files – that was one challenge we experienced during our NGO hackathon, glad it is now supported (don’t remember why we wanted it anyway);
  • links in Chatter posts (why am I so excited from things which looks completely normal?);
  • Next Best Action looks like a standard feature, need to find someone who can benefit from it.

Developers

  • Lightning Web Component is probably the biggest thing – say good bye to Aura components and say hello to LWC, which you cannot develop right in Salesforce environment but have to use some other editor (VS Code for example). They use more of todays browsers‘ native features making them faster and also allowing „regular“ front-end developers to quickly learn them and be productive;
  • unsaved changes component, which might be handy for users (check Keir’s blogpost about it);
  • WITH SECURITY_ENFORCED for SOQL queries if you don’t mind it fails down;
  • using custom metadata for setting up default values of fields;
  • new object AccountRelationship – we can link two accounts together?

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