Fluido Favorites: Salesforce Winter ’16

Summer is turning to Autumn and finally to Winter; therefore, it’s also time to change the Salesforce version from Summer ‘15 to Winter ‘16! There are major improvements and updates in the newest release, which will be released in the coming weeks by Salesforce. The biggest change in the Salesforce Winter ’16 release is naturally the Lightning Experience! This is the largest update ever in Salesforce history; it’s the new Salesforce! In addition to the lightning experience, there are plenty of other cool features as well! We have collected our personal favourites here. Keep in mind that these are only some features, find more in the release notes.

The Lightning Experience

Let’s start with the obvious, the Lightning experience! Be aware that many of the release updates are tightly linked to the Lightning experience and might therefore not be available without enabling this in your org first. The sales-centric Lightning Experience focuses on reinventing the desktop environment to improve sales productivity and customer experience. Some of the key features:

– New home page: Monitor performance, get insights on key accounts, and stay on track by seeing what to do in the Assistant.
– Opportunities: Drive the right behaviours at every stage. Use handy composer to quickly log calls, create tasks, send emails etc. Review the status of deals organised by each stage in the pipeline board. Drag deals from one stage to another, and get alerts when an action is needed on a key deal.
– Accounts and Contacts: Get the latest news about customers, and review upcoming and completed activities.
– Activities: See open tasks, planned meetings, and accomplishments in the activity timeline on each opportunity, lead, account, and contact.
– Notes: Take notes with auto-save, rich text capabilities, and the ability to relate a note to multiple records.
– Reports: The new report run page is easier to read and filter. Animated, interactive charts bring your data to life. The new dashboard editor supports more flexible layouts and components that span columns and rows.
– List views: Visualize data with handy list view charts or easily apply filters to slice the data as needed.
– Lightning Components: Use the standard ones or import your own designed Lightning Components (or download from AppExchange).

Our consultants’ favourites:

Bulkification all the way!
Both Flows and Process Builder will get enhancements that introduce better nullification. Pretty neat. Especially for orgs that frequently load a lot of records into the system and still want Processes and Flows that trigger. Process Builder seems to get the better bargain, but then again, Flow already has more features to handle nullification in place.

Hidden far down in the release notes is a beautiful little thing: Custom Lookups Enabled for Activities. It’s one of those small things that just make the world a better place.

Chatter:
– To add some flavour, you can now add some rich text styling to your chatter post. This includes your basic text italicising etc., as well as bullet lists and numbered lists.
– Broadcast groups are a special type of public, private or unlisted group where only group owners and managers can create new posts. Group members can comment on the posts created by the group owner or manager.

Universal picklists are coming to town!
Winter ’16 brings the pilot phase of Universal picklists. No more maintaining the exact same picklists in multiple objects. No general availability yet, but this is definitely a step in the right direction.

Live Agent Enhancements:
– Gives the ability to block sensitive data in chats in real-time.
– Agents who need help can raise a virtual flag that shows up in the supervisor panel. Supervisors are alerted of agents in trouble and help them.
– There’s new permission: “Assign Live Agent Skills to Users,” which can be given to anyone who needs it.

Organisation Sync: 
Looking for a way to give your users access to Salesforce during maintenance and planned upgrades? Organisation Sync lets you set up a secondary, synced Salesforce organisation where users can work when your primary organisation is unavailable. This feature is available in Salesforce Classic only.

Knowledge:
– You can now create a list of and filter reports on all Knowledge users. This helps you identify which agents can edit articles and for administrators to allocate and reallocate Knowledge user licenses.
– Agents can access Knowledge articles and articles related to cases right from their mobile device. Knowledge articles are viewable and searchable.

Improved search result relevancy:
Improvements to get better search results with top results and auto-suggested matches as you type.

Something for the developers:

Custom Metadata Type rocks! As soon as you understand what it is capable of, you’ll love it!

Apex Exception Email
Set the email addresses that receive notifications when your Apex code encounters unhandled exceptions. Emails can be sent to your Salesforce org’s users and to external email addresses.

Marketing Cloud improvements:

Next Generation Journey Builder – The world’s #1 marketing cloud makes it easier to plan, personalise and optimise every customer journey. The phenomenal new Marketing Connector seamlessly unifies the customer journey across sales, service and marketing, utilising both standard and custom objects.

Mobile Enhancements:

Users can now take notes for cases, tasks, and events. And if you opt to add the new Notes-related list to object page layouts, Salesforce1 users can quickly access related notes directly from records instead of having to switch away to the navigation menu to open the Notes item.

Users can also create notes from the related list. Notes are available in the Salesforce1 downloadable apps and in the mobile browser app (except on BlackBerry devices).

Now let’s wait for the release, and enjoy the enhancements!