Another release of Salesforce is coming closer and everyone is super excited. I’m just late to this race as Pritam, Daniel, Rakesh and Salesforce Admins already wrote about some features. So I closed myself for a few hours in a room and went through those 400+ pages. One thing I didn’t notice previously – the language is getting closer in style to the one in Trailhead. Which isn’t bad at all.
What will work and what not?
Consulting Salesforce is just getting harder and harder. Some things work only in Salesforce Classic while other only in Lightning Experience. Internet Explorer 11 will be no longer supported for Lightning Experience, but newly created organizations will be in such case automatically switched into Salesforce Classic.
Standard mail merge works only in Internet Explorer, enhanced page layouts works best in Firefox, Salesforce console is best in Chrome.
Inline editing works in Lightning Experience but doesn’t support mass update of multiple records and doesn’t work when you have lookups in views, ORs in filters, different record types.
You cannot search some objects (Documents, Activites, CRM Content, the list goes on) in Lightning Experience.
It is really getting complex, some new (and really nice) features are not available in Salesforce Classic so you will have to constantly switch back and forth. Not nice.
User experience
Logos and news about accounts, contacts and opportunities. That looks great; however, you must be in States. I kind of like the idea of crowdsourcing the correct and nice version of logos, but looks like just a few people can flag it and it will disappear.
Field-level help (did you notice it wasn’t there?) and Save & new button for quickly create multiple records.
You can filter you activities and see only those, you want to. Looks like super saver.
You can reply to email directly in Lightning Experience and you can also forward the email. I’m just not sure whether it is a good idea to automatically forward the last version of attachments and not those which are in the email you forward, but there had to be a reason for this.
Brand new navigation – we are back to the horizontal bar but with new features. And I really like it!
Two columns flows, ability to embed them in pages AND customize look and feel with REST API. The last one is just WOW, when we will be able to use it natively in pages as well? And reusable processes in Process Builder, another time saver.
Make it easier to use
Kanban everywhere (Opportunities, Campaigns, Leads, Contracts) and it makes status changes super easy and quick. If some field’s values are missing not a problem anymore, you will be able to add them. And you can edit record directly from here.
Campaign influence is generally available and I wish I can use it on customer objects as well. It is really nice on opportunities, but we have custom objects linked to contacts (and campaigns after all) and it would be super handy to see the influence on them as well.
New cumulative graph which makes me wonder how we solved it before, when we weren’t able to show how much better it gets over time. And ability to show external data in reports! (probably extra paid feature) Filter reports by hierarchy.
Lead duplication management and their quick merge.
Salesforce1 is able to send SMS message. Have no idea why they send it to number in the Phone field instead of MobilePhone, will need to migrate all data 🙁
Lightning Login looks super cool to me. I usually hate 2FA as it takes longer to log in, but this way I love. Enter my user name, authenticate on my mobile and off we go. Would I forget my mobile phone at home I can still login with my username/password. And U2F Security Keys can add another layer of security for logging in.
Communities
Ability to export template and create other communities based on it or even give it to other organization. Google Analytics so we can monitor which pages users use, how they navigate and much more – wow! Lightning Components create completely new market for development. External data available for community users.
And one drawback – no chance to change templates 🙁
Salesforce Wave
New types of graphs, I’m surprised how many styles there are, SAQL in tables (so you can calculate rank of specific records among others for defined period and much more). Way better dashboards‘ designer, Android client and more and more.
Say goodbye to
- Internet Explorer 9 & 10
- Microsoft Office Word & Excel Add-Ons
- Import My Accounts & Contacts (you have to use Data loader)
- LinkedIn integration (but Instagram will be integrated instead)
- Chatter Answers (Chatter Questions will take the lead from Winter ’18, when doing my certifications I wondered why we have two similar features)
- Salesforce1 if you don’t have iOS10 from Spring ’17 (I have 9.3.4 and the mobile doesn’t want to download anything newer)
What did you find?
Did you have time to check release notes on your own? What is your favorite features you cannot wait to implement?