Fluido Favorites: Summer’16

Salesforce Editions
New changes in editions seem great:

• Salesforce has come up with new editions – that’s one of our favourites by far. Why?
  Well, having a Partial Sandbox for Enterprise is so very, very nice. Especially for the Professional Customers, they’re really getting a lift with their new setup. We can’t wait to get an opportunity to see how much can actually be done with the new features within limits.
• Professional Edition was also missing workflows. Nowadays, it is possible to use Process Builder and build up to five processes to automate repetitive tasks. You also get sandboxes for testing and developing.
• Previously for the Professional Edition, it was not possible to have profiles, but now the orgs can use up to two custom profiles per license type. Professional Edition orgs can also use up to two permission sets. Also, record types are available: up to three record types per object.
• Many customers have had problems with the limits of Custom Tabs. Today in the Professional, Enterprise, or Unlimited Edition org, you can use as many custom tabs as you want.

Lightning Experience
In Ligthning Experience, we warmly welcome the following improvements:

• Account Teams are finally available also for Lightning experience UI. Previously, account teams were only available in Salesforce Classic.
• It’s also nice that you can add the company’s logo to the Account page.
• This is what few of us have been impatiently waiting for: Using the Lightning App Builder to create custom Home pages for different profiles. You can use different components organised in App Builder. You can even create and edit pages for leads, contacts, and other types of records! Yay!
• See Who Liked Your Post in Lightning Experience: If you’ve been wondering who liked your post in Lightning Experience, wonder no more! We present the People Who Like This Post card. This feature is available in Lightning Experience. It really looked like an odd omission in Lightning, but now it seems to be there. This is one of those small improvements that make the system so user-friendly.
• Lightning Experience bids farewell to Internet Explorer 11: While not exactly a favourite feature, this definitely deserves mention. So, Lightning does not seem to support IE in new orgs anymore. Existing customers can still continue using it for a while.
• Admins now have the ability to create custom home pages using the Lightning App Builder. What’s great is that now you can maximise the relevance of the Home page for different types of users.
  (https://releasenotes.docs.salesforce.com/en-us/summer16/release-notes/rn_sales_accounts_sfx.htm)
• Finding  Products with Ease in Lightning Experience – https://sforce.co/1rJY8NC
• Currently, the Opportunity product selection is not very user-friendly (no product listing, search results visible only after pressing enter). The new release will have your recent products available, and by the looks of it, the search results should be updated in real-time as you go.
• And finally, it’s the little things that make you happy – you can export the report data as  XLS or CVS files from Lightning Experience reports!

 Sales Cloud
Salesforce has also been thinking about how to make life easier for Sales reps and increase the productivity of their sales teams. Most of our attention caught this enhancement:

• Associate a Contact with Multiple Accounts (Generally Available)
  If you haven’t tried it yet, get ready to enjoy this new feature! Now you can finally, without tricks and without the need for Account contact roles, associate a single contact with several accounts. Available in Lightning, Classic and Salesforce1. So it will be possible to relate a contact to more than one account. Contacts to Multiple Accounts lets reps associate a single contact with multiple accounts. And now, your reps can associate more accounts with each contact. The primary account represents a direct relationship; the other accounts associated with a contact represent indirect relationships.
  (https://releasenotes.docs.salesforce.com/en-us/summer16/release-notes/rn_sales_shared_contacts.htm)

Service Cloud
In relation to Service Cloud, we picked a few cool tools from Summer 16 release which help you to avoid case feed clutter:

• Rename the Automated Case User to System so support agents can easily see when automated processes, such as case assignment rules, create a case or change the status of a case.
• Change the order of Case Feed items and records so feed items that are automatically generated appear after the customer’s first email to your support centre. This feature is available in both Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic.
• Also, Responsive List Hovers: Responsive lists now display the details of a row in a hover, so you can preview it without opening each record. The same functionality was always on recent items but now from a List View. Super useful!

Communities

• Global search in community templates 
  Ever had a partner wanting to search for a specific Case or Lead in a community? Getting the good old Global Search as a part of the community is a much-wanted and much-awaited feature. Yep, as the consultants, we now don’t need to implement this by ourselves as a custom feature for our customers.
• Take control of sharing Wave Analytics for Communities
  Letting customers and partners see summary data and trends on items that are important to them is a key used in many communities. We are very much looking forward to seeing how Wave’s capabilities can make this even more powerful and easy to use.
• Unlimited custom tabs
  You don’t come across the maximum number of tabs very often, but when you do, it can be quite annoying. Getting rid of this limitation is a great help for some of our customers. Add as many tabs as you need and whatever components you want, apart from another Tabs component.
• Additional Perks on Communities:
  Make your community’s pages work harder for you. Create one version of a page for your customers and another for your partners, and control who sees each page based on their profile.
• Important to note:
  Effective Summer ’16, we no longer support Koa, Kokua, or Napili template versions prior to Winter ’16.

Sandbox Enhancements

• Cloning sandboxes is something that has come up with even smaller projects sometimes. Now you can clone a sandbox instead of using the production environment as your sandbox source. Having more than one sandbox as a standard will often make it easier to organise your development work. It is a great help when working in a team, and this feature is available in both Lighting and Classic!

Administration and Customization

• Process Builder enhancements 
  Now processes can execute actions on more than one criterion. This means you now have the ability for your process to continue executing onto the next criteria even if the previous criteria were met and some actions have already been already run. Should the process stop, or should it continue evaluating the next criteria in the process? It is up to you!
• Restricted picklists 
  You will definitely celebrate this one: Until now, you have had the ability to enter any value to a picklist through the API. For example, through data loading. This potentially results in poor data. Now you can restrict picklists so that it validates the values upon insert or update.
• Troubleshoot Your Validation Rules More Quickly
  You will now get all the errors on your flaw-ridden validation rules right away instead of just the first one. Small improvement but should help with the frustration of fixing one error just to be prompted with another one. Or maybe you will be totally hopeless when you get seven error messages at once… Don’t know, but at least it should help with fixing them.

Developer Favorites
Here are some tips our developers like to share with you:

• Debugging
  The new debugging features can be used to root out problems in your Salesforce Org. Debugging changes include a more efficient user interface for trace flags and debug levels, improved logging, and the ability to manage your Apex Debugger sessions in Lightning Experience. This feature is available in both Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic.
• Simplify Development of Asynchronous Callouts by Using Named Credentials
  You can now use named credentials in long-running asynchronous callouts from a Visualforce page’s controller. A named credential specifies the URL of a callout endpoint and its required authentication parameters.
• Suppress Null Values When Serializing Apex Objects
  “The current implementation of the Apex serialise method returns null values when serialising Apex objects into JSON. Now we’ve added a serialise method with a flag to suppress null values. Set suppressApexObjectNulls to true to suppress them when serialising Apex objects into JSON”
• Nested Queries
  When I retrieve data from the database with nested queries, just to check I have the right structure, I usually use some JSON viewer to view the JSON structure of the retrieved data:
  JSON.serializePretty(objectList) – previously this structure was a  bit weird with null values with this new feature; the structure is clean.

Bits and pieces
And at the end few bits and pieces are worth mentioning:

• “Salesforce App for Outlook” is now known as “Lightning for Outlook”
  Salesforce for Outlook plug-in stays the same, and this rebranding is only for the online cloud version that is installed through Office 365 setup.
• Exchange Sync will be known as Lightning Sync.
  And it’s not considered to be beta anymore! No support for Tasks yet, but Events and Contacts are synced.
• Create a Calendar from Anything in Salesforce – https://sforce.co/1TzbAup 
  Enables you to create a calendar in seconds out of a custom or standard object. Just pick an object and date field, and you can have a calendar of your closing opportunities or campaigns by starting date. This should be a very useful feature.

Well, and that’s it! Here are Fluido’s insights into Salesforce Summer ’16 release and its new features, which we are looking forward to using!