Fluido Favorites Spring’16

Even if we are still in winter, we can already feel the Spring in the air. And with the coming Spring and the increasing amount of sunshine, there is a new release from Salesforce! Our team had a look at the Salesforce Spring ‘16 release and assembled the features which caught our attention the most. Don’t forget the rest of the new features and improvements either; check them out in the release notes.

Lighting Experience

• Person Accounts: Supported in Lightning Experience (Beta): It is still in beta, but it looks promising. With person accounts, you can extend the standard business-to-business account model to include business-to-consumer sales. What a great way to capture information about the individuals you do business with!
• Reports and Dashboards: Analyze Your Data in Lightning Experience: Lightning Reports are getting better. Now you get more out of your data. The improved features include a completely new report run page which is nice and easy to read and filter. These animated and interactive charts truly bring your data to life! There is also a new dashboard editor that supports flexible layouts and components that span columns and rows.
• ​Create Lightning Experience Navigation Menus: Navigation menu can now be customised! With this improvement, you can modify the navigation to have the shortcuts that are most used by you and your users. There’s, for example, a sales navigation menu that prioritises the items most applicable to your sales team. Similarly, your execs can have a time-saving navigation menu that contains reports and dashboards at the top they need most.
• Edit Inline in Lightning Experience: Popular inline edit from Salesforce Classic. Salesforce users can now edit individual fields on a record details tab in the lightning experience and easily edit multiple fields at once. And there’s more: Do you know that feeling when you’re editing a record and accidentally navigating the page? Now you’ll be warned if you try to leave the page before saving.
• Lightning Experience Now Supports Customer Groups: You can now create groups that allow customers and add customers to those groups in Lightning Experience. This feature is now available in both Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic!

Communities

• Extend the Power of Wave with Communities and New Actions: Now, you can bring Wave Analytics together with the rest of your Salesforce experience. This is done by sharing your visualisations through Communities (which is now generally available!) and accessing additional Salesforce actions from custom menus in Wave lenses and dashboards.
• Lightning File Preview Player Now Available in Communities: File previews that were brought to Lightning Experience in Winter ‘16, are now available in Communities as well! They’re so fast and neat and will make life easier!

Files

• Use Files Without Chatter: Now, you can use Salesforce Files also without having Chatter on! Of course, it’ll still work with Chatter as well.
• Share Files with People and Groups in Lightning Experience: Sharing files has never been easier. Now you can share a file directly with people and groups while managing access to the file in one place. And what’s even better, now you have control over whether others can share and unshare a file.
• Upload Files to Notes & Attachments List in Salesforce Classic: Files that you upload to the Notes & Attachments related list on records in Salesforce Classic are now Salesforce Files objects rather than the old attachment objects. A new org pref in Salesforce Files Settings controls this behaviour and is enabled by default for new orgs. This feature is helpful for orgs that want to migrate from attachments to files but still need to keep their existing notes and attachments. This feature is available in Salesforce Classic only.

General Administration

• Test-Drive Global Picklists More Easily (Pilot): This feature is still a pilot but looks promising to us! Global picklists just got more accessible! Global picklists let you efficiently reuse a single list of values for multiple custom picklist fields. Easily share picklists across objects by creating picklist fields based on the master list of values. Your picklist data stays clean because users can’t add erroneous or redundant values through the API. This feature is available in Salesforce Classic only.
• Eliminate Picklist Clutter with Restricted Picklists (Beta): Also this is yet in beta mode, but try it out! The feature is useful, especially if data comes from a different source than Salesforce. Enforce the integrity of your picklist data with restricted picklists. A restricted picklist field includes only the values that you’ve defined. Your picklist data stays clean because users can’t add erroneous or redundant values. This feature is available in both Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic. Another reason to try restricted picklists is that you can take advantage of them in custom metadata types. Custom metadata types are custom-defined types of application metadata that can be packaged and used along with an app. They save time by letting you define configurations and create reusable app components and features. Picklists on custom metadata types are always restricted, so enable restricted picklists to use custom metadata types.

Favorite Picks by Consultants

• Purchase Platform Cache: Let’s see how it improves the performance! You can now purchase Platform Cache space, which can significantly improve the performance of your applications. This feature is available in Salesforce Classic only. Platform Cache is available to customers with Enterprise Edition orgs and above. The following editions come with some default cache space, but often, adding more cache gives even greater performance enhancements.
• Work Orders in Lightning Experience: It’s useful to see work order on a mobile device. Work orders make it possible to track work to be performed on your customers’ products, making life easier for support agents and field technicians. This feature is available in both Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic. Work orders make it possible to efficiently track repairs, standard maintenance, and other types of service. Work orders can be associated with accounts, assets, cases, contacts, entitlements, service contracts, and other work orders. You can also create custom relationships between work orders and other standard or custom objects.

Some of our Developers Favorites

• Set and Modify the CreatedDate Field in Apex Tests: No more workarounds for a created date! The System.Test.setCreatedDate method. was added to set a Datetime value for a test-context sObject’s CreatedDate field.
• Manage Everyone’s Reports and Dashboards: Now, you can find and delete everyone’s reports and dashboards even if they are saved in their private folders! The allPrivate query scope is used for this.
• Run Script After Sandbox Creation and Refresh: It can be suitable to create some meaningful data in the sandbox after refresh. To make your sandbox environment business ready, you automate data manipulation or business logic tasks.
• Enable Writable External Objects with External Systems That Require CSRF Protection: There are even more systems the Salesforce can communicate in both ways by using external objects! This feature is available in both Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic.

Have we forgotten some great new features to mention? Leave us a comment and tell us what you think of these!