Events and meetups

Written by Daryl Moon

The next release of Salesforce (Spring ’20) is coming in mid-February 2020. The release notes are out now and the race is on the find the hidden treasures that make life easier for users, admins and developers who use Salesforce on a daily basis. By the time we all return from the holiday season, these features will be nearly ready for us to use.

Assign Tasks to Queues

Tasks can now be assigned to a queue instead of multiple tasks being created when added to a group of users. This allows all team members to help out without the task being assigned to a single user or being manually delegated or reassigned.

Opportunity Scores from Einstein

All Sales Cloud Users will have access to Einstein Opportunity Scores which uses AI to help sales reps and managers to prioritise opportunities and close more deals. Einstein Opportunity Scoring gives each opportunity a score, from 1 to 99, which is available on opportunity records, list views, the forecasts page, and reports. This feature will be available on a rolling basis starting in 2020 – at no additional cost.

Opportunity Contact Roles

You can use the automation tools including process Builder, Flow Builder or Workflow Rules to automate adding Opportunity Contact Roles to every new Opportunity. You can also automate notifying Opportunity Owners when Opportunity Contact Roles are created or updated.

Email Threading

The activity timeline will now relate emails to a single thread so you can see the full discussion as a single conversation.

Schedule Emails

Users of the Salesforce Inbox or the High Velocity Sales licences can schedule emails for delivery in the future. This allows the email to be received at the optimal time for it to be read and hopefully actioned.

With the Send Email Later – Pending List component you can reschedule, edit or delete an already-scheduled email message.

Case Management Enhancements

Merging cases is now available without users needing to have modify all permissions on cases. The merged cases are added to the Merged Cases related list. If the user does have modify all then the merged cases are deleted.

Hovering over the case subject now provides a more detailed compact preview of the case:

When a case has been escalated, it will now display the small red arrow icon next to the case subject when viewing the highlights panel, list view and compact preview:

Clone objects and their Related Records

A new action to Clone Objects with Related records makes it easy to clone an object with all its related records. Note: This action needs to be added to the page layout for the required object.

Survey Enhancements

There are a number of changes to Surveys to make them more
functional and more visually attractive. These include:

Adding images to question, welcome and thank you pages:

A colour-coded scale for the Net promoter Score:

Additional logic for questions:

There are also changes to the opacity of the content card, button width, improved visibility of pages and branding tabs, the background colour of surveys is changed to white and the colour of the ranking item buttons changes according to the colour of the answer choice buttons:

Update Preview Automatically in Report

You will now be able to edit reports faster without waiting for the preview to refresh with the Update Preview Automatically feature. Turn this off until your report changes are complete, then click refresh to see the changes in the preview window.

Report Subscriptions Attachment

Receive the results of a report subscription as a formatted spreadsheet. Note: this is a beta function so you will need to enable it and remember it’s not production ready yet.

Trailblazer.Me

With your Trailblazer.Me login, you will be able to access multiple salesforce sites with a single login and manage your profile and settings in one place.

Permission Set Groups

Now you can assign users a single permission set group instead of multiple permission sets. Permission set groups combine selected permission sets to provide all the permissions that users need for their job.

Flow Enhancements

There are several improvements to the Flow Builder as it’s
functionality is improved further – to eventually replace Process Builder
(still some time away).

Before-save updates in flow are up to 10 times faster than the equivalent in Process Builder:

Edit a flow from the App Builder:

Deactivate a flow from within the flow:

Salesforce Data Mask for Sandboxes

Salesforce Data Mask is a managed package that your admin
can install to “mask” (or obfuscate) sensitive data in full or partial copy
sandboxes. You will then be able to work with copies of your production data
safely while respecting the privacy of the data.

Remember these features are not available until Mid-February 2020. More details are available in the release notes here: https://releasenotes.docs.salesforce.com/en-us/spring20/release-notes/salesforce_release_notes.htm

Author – Izaaz Gaffar, Cludo

For those of you who have logged into their sandboxes recently, you may have noticed Einstein floating around on his little bicycle. What does this mean for you? Only one of the three most exciting times of the year, Salesforce Spring 19 Release.

Want to know more about the exciting features Salesforce is bringing to you? Make sure you read on! Before we take a dive into the new goodies though, I encourage you all to review the below key dates.

• January 7 onwards – Looking to add another cool badge to your collection? Make sure you complete the Spring 19 Release Trailhead here!
• January 25 – Check out the release webinars for admins and developers here – this will ensure you stay ahead of the curve!
• JANUARY 11 | FEBRUARY 1 | FEBRUARY 8 – Spring 19 Release over 3 weekends, make sure you check out Salesforce Trust to verify when your org will be switching over.
• April 22 – For those Salesforce connoisseurs out there that have certifications, the Spring 19 Release exams will be available by April 22 – Don’t forget, these release exams have been moved to Trailhead.

Now that the logistics are complete, let’s dive into the goodies that Salesforce has brought in this release! The article has been broken into the top 3 updates for End Users, Admins and Developers.

End Users

1. Pinned Lists are no longer a feature of the past!

Tired of hitting the “Recently Viewed” list view every time you jump into an object? Or perhaps you have a go-to list view that you’d like to see. Easy, introducing Pinned List Views – simply select the list view that you would like as your default, click the pin icon and off you go! I know a LOT of my users will be happy to see this, personally I am too!

2. Attention Sales Managers – Boost your Inside Sales Reps productivity through the roof with Salesforce High Velocity Sales.

Salesforce High-Velocity Sales is a streamlined solution targeted for sales reps speeding up their sales process. Part of the Sales Cloud family, this tool consists of multiple productivity and automation features:

1. Work Queues – Reps are guided through a prioritised list of activities ensuring they make the next correct phone call, email, text message or task.
2. Lightning Dial-er – Get to your prospects faster with Salesforce native click-to-call.
3. Lightning Sales Console – unified, intuitive user experience which ensures reps are spending less time on administration and more time on selling.
4. Einstein – Einstein leverages your sales history to provide scoring on which leads to focus on and how to convert them faster.
5. Sales Cadences – Remember the Work Queues we spoke about earlier? The list of prioritised, scheduled activities that appear in Work Queues are driven from Sales Cadences. Sales Cadences allows companies to implement best practices, standardise processes and boost efficiency when it comes to selling. With a clicks, not code interface, Sales Cadences can be built to guide both novices and veterans for when to call, when to email or when to wait during the prospecting process.

3. Did I read increased Data Storage?

This is probably one of the most exciting updates to this release. Data storage is now increasing from 1GB to 10GB for selected additions. As an example, prior to Spring 19 – A professional edition org with 10 users would be granted 20MB each, which would equate to 200MB (rounded up to 1GB). Now, a professional edition with 10 users will receive 10GB + 200MB for the 10 users, equalling 10.2GB.

Admins

1. Goodbye Cloud Flow Designer, Hello Flow Builder

Another one for you flow-natics out there, gone are the days of adobe flash crashing in your browser when opening a flow, introducing the new Salesforce Flow Builder. The new Flow Builder features a simplified user interface, consolidated elements, and a seamless migration experience – old flows when opened will display in the new Flow Builder.

2. Organise your email templates back into structured, secured folders.

No more Private and Public Folders, custom email template folders can now be created to put back some structure into your org – oh and did I mention nested folders?

In addition to custom email template folders, folder based sharing has been introduced to ensure users only have access to the templates they need.

3. Create Objects from Spreadsheets

Have a new object with hundreds of fields you need to create? Don’t want to use the schema builder or go through the interface field by field? Now objects and its data can be created by importing either a Google sheet, a Quip spreadsheet, an .xls file, or a .csv file directly into the navigational items tab in a Lightning App.

Developers

1. Create big Objects via the User Interface

Big objects allow you to store and manage large amounts of data natively on the Salesforce platform. Previously, big objects could only be created via the Metadata API, now – big objects can built within the user interface, fields can be defined and index built for how the object will be queried.

Reference – Create Custom Big Objects from Setup

2. Clone Sandboxes (Generally Available)

Simplify your release management process by utilising the ability to clone sandboxes. As you move through the development life cycle, you can now clone an existing sandbox rather than using production as the source.

Reference – Save Time by Cloning Sandboxes (Generally Available)

3. Lightning Web Components

Lightning Web Components and the original Aura Components programming models can now coexist and interoperate on the same page when building Lightning Components. Lightning Web Components are custom HTML elements built using HTML and modern JavaScript.

Reference – Lightning Web Components (Generally Available)

And that’s a wrap! What are your top new features in Spring 19? Please share your thoughts in the comments below. For a full list of features, please visit Salesforce Spring 19 Release Notes.

James Keaney, Director & Co-Founder

Integrating your email and calendar with Salesforce is one of the most valuable features you can enable for your users.  It will drive adoption and make the platform work for your team.  An example of this is the new Contact sync feature:  now a Sales rep can keep their Contacts up to date in Salesforce, from within Outlook or Gmail and know that the details that they keep up to date in Salesforce will automatically be synced down to their phone via their Contact address book.  Personally, this is my favourite feature.

Summer 17 on June 11 will enhance this integration yet again.  Some of the noteworthy enhancements are listed below:

Relate whilst you compose: relate emails to records whilst you compose them.  This will save your Sales reps time navigating back to their sent items to associate an email to a Contact.

Lightning Email Templates: Create, share and use lightning email templates from within Lightning for Gmail/Outlook.  Make it quick and easy to send repeatable content to customers and prospects.

Stay logged into Lightning for Gmail:  Salesforce session will be preserved now.  No more logging in every 4 hours.

Attachment selector: choose which attachments to save to Salesforce.

Events stay up to date:  Now when your events are sync’d through Lightning for Gmail and that event changes, those changes will be kept in sync.

Contact Sync:  Contacts can be sync’d between Salesforce and Google in both directions now. (Careful!)

Sync Frequency:  Contacts and Events will now sync more frequently with Gmail and Outlook.  

Now, I know not everyone in the business world uses G Suite for their email, calendar and apps, but for those who do, Salesforce bringing their integrations to G Suite is the best and most welcome feature in a long while.

Lightning for Gmail

This is the best. I have been using the pilot for a few months now allowing me to be able to view the Contacts, Accounts and other information right from Gmail. Operating Salesforce from Gmail is a massive time saver.  It is also a great way to ensure that the data you have in your org is clean and present.  As emails have all the Account and Contact details in user signatures, it is easy to use the Lightning sidebar in Gmail to create and update records.

Now that this feature goes mainstream (from pilot to beta) it gets the addition of:

• Inline editing in gmail (never leave GMAIL!!!!)
• Drill down into a records detail, lists, chatter and activities
• Relate emails to records with Enhanced email. (Brilliant!) The Enhanced email object is now an object that represents an Email, gone are the days of an Email being logged as a type of Task.

Admins and developers will now be able to customise the way that Lightning for Gmail is presented to users.  Customising the objects and components that are delivered.  Gmail + Salesforce now becomes a weapon.

Lightning Sync for Google

This integration connects a user’s Google Calendar and Google Contacts to Salesforce.  All in the background.  Now Sales reps can manage their days or weeks and know that the activities are being logged and assigned automatically to the right Contacts and Accounts.

The new feature here is that Contact sync is available.  This will make keeping an address book up to date between the two systems.

How hard is it to set up these Google integrations?

Not that hard, because Salesforce and Google are both cloud apps, they both utilise a framework that makes connecting these applications relatively straightforward.  As it is all cloud based, it means that rolling out these features requires turning them on, no software to install in Outlook.

Microsoft Integration

All of the above mentioned with the Google integration applies to the Microsoft Integration.   These features require Exchange to either be run from Office 365 or on the latest version if run internally.  So the tricky bit for a business is spending the effort on migrating to Exchange 2016 or Office 365.

Salesforce for Outlook

One thing I do want to get off my chest is that Salesforce for Outlook might seem like it brings all the features to the table if you are on an earlier version of Exchange, but the nature of rolling this software out makes it a painful thing to manage for IT teams.  In my view, the effort is best spent to migrate to the latest version of Exchange or Office 365.

---

Thanks again for reading.  Looking forward to the Spring ’17 update in a few weeks.

James Keaney | james dot keaney at cludo dot com dot au