Another release ahead of us (actually it is already here as I didn’t have time to check the release notes before it landed to my organisations and then it had to wait for more interesting blog post to be published first). At first it looked like feature heavy release, when I checked better I don’t think there are so many of them, but still some are pretty cool.
Lightning, Lightning, Lightning
The very first part in Release Notes is dedicated to move to Lightning. We already know that from Winter ’20 the Lightning will be enabled for everyone (well, you can actively kind of opt-out by enabling the right permission); the Transition Asistant has been improved (probably never really saw it) and it can check for Visualforce pages which might make problems after switch (I’m still surprised how much energy Salesforce invest into improving VF pages, for example there is a new tag which can make them auto update in the same way as Lightning Component do).
The most important point – In-App Guidenance, which enables you to add prompts almost everywhere to show users what is new and changed, you can also set how often it should pop-up. Now you just need to find the time to write all those text and set it up.
Changes in UI
Enhanced Related Lists are in beta, but they promise great things – you can show up to 10 columns (as was standard in Classic), can choose how many records you can see. Related to this is also the ability to filter related lists, sadly the filter is temporary and you have to set it up every time.
Utility Items are not aligned to the right, small but probably nice feature. Plus the Notes can pop-out, so you can – for example – put them on second screen.
See which objects have been searched and how many results each of them have is awesome. I hated clicking through them just to find nothing was found.
The whole UI is more colorful now, has more shades. Clicking on the navigation menu will show you 5 recent items (instead of 3 till now), you can define the color of hyperlink, header is hidden when you print the page, you can switch Lightning to mimic Classic when showing record details (why would you do it?) and you and your users can choose whether to show activities in the Lightning way or switch back to related lists (just go to settings and search for Record Page Settings). Rich Text Editor has been change, which – besides everything else you won’t notice – will allow you to insert pictures. Yeah!
And the most important feature? You can link specific step in Path with confetti!
Sales Cadence
Really looking forward when they will include this feature in standard and not as paid add-on. Works now for Person Accounts as well (seriously, it didn’t before?), you can link more of them together, choose how to sort your queue, preview emails which will be send and you can call it from flow.
CPQ
Einstein everywhere, here it can suggest the ideal price based on historical data. Curious how much sales people will trust it.
But the logic updated in price action formulas when calculating with percents is serious one – YOU NEED TO UPDATE SUCH FORMULAS, otherwise it’ll return nonsense.
Reporting
This is huge! Row level formulas (no need for simple formula field to calculate something, in beta, needs to be enabled), conditional formating in Lightning, search for records in report (understand, it is cool, but why don’t we rely on browser search and invest energy into this?), conditional notification definition in Lightning (I still don’t understand why and how it is done, but you can subscribe to 5 reports in Classic and to another 5 in Lightning).
Two level sorting on dashboard components, ability to change width of columns (which will be reset every time you open the dashboard).
Einstein Analytics support connection to Oracle Eloqua, can sync more data with Amazon Redshift and has better performance with Google BigQuery. Plus new templates, which are awesome as always, but somehow I wonder when they will develop applications for core Salesforce as well.
Debug steps is awesome, ability to sort by dimensions is pretty cool as well. Pilot of versioning of your dashboard, lenses and dataflows sounds awesome, now you had to save it manually (or probably use DX to help you with that). But you have to use Workbench to handle it anyway during the pilot, there is no UI for that.
Communities
Ability to create reports is nice, global quick actions plus mass quick actions, choose what users can do in list views (change table to kanban, inline edit, list search, list pinning and list actions) sounds promising, I wanted to hide a lot of those actions from users the other day.
Survey
What was paid add-on once upon a time is kind of free. You can send unlimited number of them, first 300 responses are for free. And that’s probably all worth saying about it.
Mobile
The mobile app now supports Path and confetti, iOS 12 and above is supported (as well as Android 6+)
Developers
ExperienceBundle to download information about community (instead of the SiteDotCom binary file).
Continuation class in APEX to make long-running requests from Aura/LWC looks interesting, they aren’t allowed to do any DML operation.
Insert LWC into VF page – well, why not. Just, why exactly? The same goes for <apex:liveController/> which will make your WF page re-render dynamically the same way Aura/LWC does. Just … didn’t we want to leave all this behind?
Disable access to non-global APEX controller methods in managed packages is absolutly obvious, just wonder whether it will make my hack to DocuSign Gen not working. Hopefully not.
supportedFormFactors so you can define for which device it will be rendered.
force:source:deploy and force:source:retrieve will work the same way as their respective mdapi commands, so you don’t have to worry whether you pull/push to scratch org or standard org.
Ability to define more features in scratch org definition file, still not all of them, but way more.
Larger Debug Logs – from 5MB to 20MB, you can generate 1GB max of them in 15 minutes.
A tons of new parameters for Aura and Lightning Web Components.
Others
Patient Timeline is super cool, would be great to be able to use it elsewhere as well. Or maybe Amnon Kruvi’s app will be able to do that.
I love the Automation Home screen, really looking forward to find whether it will actually help me to improve things. And the notification builder looks promising as well, I migrated from email to Chatter, so now will probably even migrate some thing to these notifications only.
Evaluate Criteria Based on Original Values in Process Builder critical updates is really serious, it might change the result of your whole process, so go and re-check them.
That’s all?
Live chat, dialer, Pardot, Knowledge, FSL, merge cases (beta), conditional macros, muted permissions (in Pilot) or improved partner search and even showing where they delivered their work (not sure they might want to show it sometimes). Yeah, there are much more in the full release notes, so feel free to go and check it, but frankly, those features didn’t really ring the bell.
Frankly, this really is great, but not as full of new features as I would hope for. The most important to me are finally being able to have more than 4 columns on related lists, which shouldn’t be the highlight of new release. Or is this the new standard?