It only feels like only yesterday Winter ’18 graced our Org’s, but its time to prepare for another release! The Spring ’18 release notes were published, and are full of some great features that were showcased at Dreamforce, as well as some pleasant surprises. There is so much fantastic content contained in the Spring ’18 release, expect to see multiple blog posts covering some of the features in more detail.
Without further ado, here are 5 features that are really going to change the way you work with Salesforce.
1. Custom Themes
The ability to customise the look and feel of Salesforce has never really been available (Apart from attempting to get your logo under 20kb to upload to documents!). From Spring ’18 the age of bland Orgs ends. Showcased at Dreamforce, the ability to completely customise the colours of your Lightning Application is here, you can look to change..
- Brand image
- Brand colours
- Page background image
- Default Avatar image
Salesforce have made clear in the release notes that this is just the start, they plan to add further customisation in the future.
2. Salesforce Surveys
One of the bigger surprises for me, Salesforce has released a Surveys application! This was a huge shock for me and I still can’t find any evidence of this being mentioned out there in the nether. For me, this is massive news that I think could have huge value in the way that companies proactively gather feedback. Unfortunately, it does look like that Survey’s are at an added cost, although they are included in the Health Cloud. Although there are many survey tools out there that have great integrations to Salesforce, this could be a game changer.
Two Lightning Components have also be released for maximum effect, a Lightning component and a Community component.
3. Duplicate Jobs (Reactive Dupe Management)
Duplicates are a pain for most organisations. When there is so much data flying about and incoming from all directions, it’s something that all Admins struggle to keep on top of. With the relatively recent release of duplicate and matching rules in Salesforce, it is becoming incredibly easy to block or alert users of potential duplicates.
However, something which still slows down a lot of organisations is the ability to sort out existing duplicates in the system. There are some well known AppExchange apps that do a great job, but now Salesforce is bringing this to the masses for free. Duplicate Jobs allows you to report on, view, and merge duplicates which already exist in your system. Have at it!
4. Linkedin Integration for Leads
To further automate your Leads coming into your Org, Salesforce has brought out a “Web2Lead” style integration with LinkedIn. Available in Lightning & Classic, you can now enable the ability for LinkedIn Lead Gen advertisements to create Leads inside of Salesforce. With a very familiar interface, this feature could save hours from your marketing teams day.
5. Store Certain Data Privacy Preferences (GDPR)
With the massive changes to how companies handle individuals data coming into play next year, specifically with GDPR, Salesforce has started to shape to ensure their systems are compliant. With Spring ’18 comes a new object “Individual”. This new object gives you the ability to track individuals customers preferences in terms of :
- Collecting, storing, and sharing their personal data
- Packaging their personal data so they can take ownership of it
- Deleting records and personal data related to them
- Solicitation of products and services
- Tracking their geolocation and web activity
In addition, Salesforce has also started to provide recommended solutions for dealing with certain scenarios, check them out here.
You can determine and customize the stages that are important to your organization and provide guidance for your users.
In LEX we had the path available for an account, opportunity, lead, campaign, contract, order, and custom objects. However, with Case being one of the objects in Salesforce with most functionality tied in, it has taken a bit longer to arrive, but it is finally here.
Within Classic, your customisation options are relatively limited with the navigation bar. Sure you can rearrange and add/remove tabs, but that’s about it. Within this release, Salesforce are giving us the ability to reorder, rename, add/remove, but also add temporary tabs! These don’t have to be just objects, you can also now add records, lists, or dashboards.
8. Some TLC for Flows
Visual Flows are hidden gems. Unfortunately, it’s not so widely used, but as they can be easily embedded in any Lightning page using a standard component, which means they have become ultra powerful!
With this release for Flows within Lightning you get to enable file attachment in flows using the File Upload Component, you can also launch a flow from an object-specific action and you can embed lightning components within flows.
If this made you hesitant to make the move, now you have no more excuses, both are generally available and more productive than ever within Lightning Experience.
You can use quick text to insert predefined messages into macro instructions and to make things even more productive, use merge fields in the quick text, which is a totally new feature.
New to the Lightning app builder, you can add this component to your lightning pages to streamline the length management of your page so that your users can collapse sections within it.
You can also use the Accordion component on all record pages.
Did I miss anything? What are your favourite features? Please comment and share and stay tuned for more..!!
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