It is really great, that Salesforce provides us with a free book three times a year. 552 pages of awesomeness for free, who can believe that. Here is the list of things which got my attention for the Spring ’20 release which will hit us this or next weekend.
They changed the App Launcher! Not sure I like this smaller version more, but when you click View All you will get the old version, which has all the objects sorted vertically. Would I not use the search bar I’ll be able to find them quicker this way. The fact that your users can change the order of the apps is just … sometimes I’m not sure these changes are that important.
When you search for contact and opportunity it will also show you account name – no more guessing or including the company in opportunity name.
How long is it, 2 years? When they came with surveys it was paid feature, now it is free till some number of sent surveys and is better and better with every release, I would say we can slowly say good bye to GetFeedback and similar.
Images in questions are nice, being able to reuse previous answer in follow-up question is really great and being able to branch the survey based on previous answers is much needed feature. Auto-progressing is just small sweet on top.
Lightning Scheduler looks better and better as well, pity it is paid add-on. Skill Matching, combination with Einstein Bots, allow Guest Users to use it and support in flows. Feels I have plenty of organisations who use Calendly now-a-days and might really use this.
URL „Hacks“ are back, now officially supported and we can predefine fields when creating new records. Great in case when Quick Action isn’t the right solution. And look – you don’t need to know field ID but can use its name!
/lightning/o/Account/new?defaultFieldValues=
Name={!URLENCODE(Account.Name)},
OwnerId={!Account.OwnerId},
AccountNumber={!Account.AccountNumber},
NumberOfEmployees=35000,
CustomCheckbox__c={!IF(Account.SomeCheckbox__c, true, false)}
Enhanced Related Lists are out of beta, I already enabled them in several organisations and they are super cool. Would it be possible to auto-enable them everywhere with one click, that would be awesome. Up to 10 fields, resizing columns, sorting, text wrapping, refresh button. Now I only need to be able to set a filter on it and add the same related list twice (or more).
Salesforce CMS gets love in every release as well, I just skip it completely. Or should I move my blog to Salesforce? Tempting, but it will take a lot of energy.
Opportunity Scoring for free! It just need to learn a bit about you (meaning you have big enough sample of data and you also track enough different information about opportunities based on which it came make estimates) and then you will see what are your chances. I’m curious how much in-line it will be with AEs feelings.
Plus multiple emails and phones for Individual and Person Accounts including details such as when is the best time to reach them. Subscription object for storing info about newsletters they signed for.
Adding products to opportunities just got way better as well with filters. That looks like a great surprise for a few orgs I know.
Support for Opportunity Contact Role in Process Builder is small but nice change, we will just use it at one project. Plus ability to add custom fields.
Being able to add account info to filters on contact list views is … nice, I wonder where we will stop needing reports as the border just got a bit more fuzzy. Also – why just on contact list views?
Cloning campaigns or opportunities with related records – this one is huge! Actually not that much. Originally I wrote „So far orgs could clone the campaign and then add all campaign members again via report, now it is just one click.“ The problem is that on campaigns it clones just Campaign Member Statuses. Anyway, one new button we need to remember to add to page layout.
In Summer ’20 the email fields should support UTF-8, meaning we will be able to use our special characters in email addresses (as the existing norm allows). I’m not sure whether I should be excited or sad as on every single implementation when we import data at least one contact fails because they have such character in email address. And it is there by mistake. So now it will go well, but the email will never be delivered as in fact the address doesn’t exist.
Being able to assign task to a queue – already got one request for it a few weeks ago. Before you could assign it to multiple people which effectively resulted in cloning the task, now there will be just one task which can be completed by anyone from that queue (meaning we have to set it up up front).
News got more relevant, now includes information from Germany, Netherlands, France and some others. It isn’t US only!
I need to learn and play more with the „new“ Individual object as it got a lot of new things as well. One of them is the Gmail/Outlook extension which can show you which people you shouldn’t send email to, because they didn’t wish to. And there is difference between the Email-opt-out field on contact and fields on Individual record. And between commercial and non-commercial email and you can also forbid some people to send the commercial one.
You can merge duplicated cases. That’s not the most important about it, the great thing is that you can manually select which cases you want to merge and that you can keep the duplicates and they will be linked to the main one. Both of that is cool, might be great to have the same for accounts & contacts.
Ability to insert formatted code into case emails is nice as well as bulk macros or running macros on background so you don’t have to wait till they finish. Small touches, but nice.
Reports – you can switch off automatic preview when creating report, so it is way quicker. Plus we got field by field comparison (was in beta in Winter) which is super cool as well as count of unique values (good bye Power Of One).
Einstein Analytics got a lot of love as well. Data Catalog which will show you where data come from and where they are used.
MuleSoft connector, in pilot we have a lot of other new connections – SugarCRM, Zendesk, SAP SuccessFactor as well as other Salesforce Clouds such as Sales, Service or CPQ so you don’t need to worry about the links between objects because it will be set up for you.
Raised limits, being able to use filters for quicker sync, more granularity when scheduling sync with local Salesforce. Plus new apps. Direct Data – yes, we can do SOQL from EA to SF without replicating first. Dashboard versioning and collaborating on it before publishing to users. And Bindings just became Interactions and got their own editor.
New Mobile App came in Winter but has to be enabled. Now everyone will get it, a bit different UI which makes more sense (to me) and allow you to share direct link to records as one of great new feature.
Almost at the end of the whole release notes is the best part – flow enhancements.
Now you can:
- run flow directly before save and it is 10 times faster than process builder. And it also changed the order of executions and run even before before Triggers;
- we don’t need to create variables anymore as they are automatically created;
- Get Records element can store all fields and not just those you specified (I always forget some as I update the flow, but what happened to the theory that we need to be selective to what we need, will we also get SELECT * ?);
- run flow in system mode, till now it run in user mode, unless you fired it from process builder. I just need to re-read this sentence several time to be sure what it really can „The flow still respects org-wide default settings, role hierarchies, sharing rules, manual sharing, teams, and territories, but it ignores object permissions, field-level access, or other permissions of the running user“ – looks like the record level access is respected but not field level;
- being able to use related record values is a big!
Permission Set Groups are here. Being able to use bare profiles and all extras to set via permission sets meant plenty of them and admins struggled as which one they need to assign. No more problems like this, just add one group and you are done. And it also includes mute permissions which means that it actively block the permission which might be added in different set. Now we only need to be able to use it for page layout and lightning pages assignments.
Direct Read Access to Custom Settings & Custom Metadata Types is disabled by default and we need to allow users in profiles for specific custom settings. This sounds huge and we need to check profiles. Similar looks this critical update, which is planned for Summer ’20 – Require Permission to View Record Names in Lookup Fields. When you don’t have access to the record in lookup field you won’t even see the name in the field. That sounds strange.
Salesforce Data Mask is probably great to those with full sandbox as they can provide access to developers without worrying about data as they will be masked/changed.
Plenty and plenty of other changes, but these are important to me and orgs I care about. Which new thing catch your attention?
Good!! Thank you!!