Spring 17: What to look forward to in the next release of Salesforce

The next big Salesforce release will soon be available in sandboxes and here are some of the features that will delight you.

For those not in the loop, Salesforce releases major features in three releases annually. These releases are scheduled for Spring (February), Summer (Apr-May) and Winter (Oct-Nov). You can read about all the features that were rolled out as part of the winter 17 update in the release notes.

Kanban everywhere

Kanban view was introduced in lightning for leads and opportunities. It let you take these records through various stages by dragging and dropping these records that are displayed as cards, on a tabular interface. This functionality is now available for almost all objects. You can specify the picklist field on the basis of which the interface should show up and the field that needs to be summarised. (example: Account rating and Expected revenue from the company).

Path in all custom objects

Path is the visual representation of a business process. It let the business communicate the essential details that needs to be captured at each step that a record goes through. Businesses could also add a guidance for success for each stage. Initially this functionality was available only for Leads and Opportunities. However, with Spring 17' it is now available more widely. That said, it is not clear if it will be available for all standard objects as of now.

App builder updates

Lightning app builder allows system admins to create custom interfaces for homepage, record pages and even stand alone applications using drop and drop functionality. Some of the interesting additions here are as follows:

1. Triple column layout for record pages.
2. Ability to drag and drop individual related list in tabs on columns.
3. Option to show up to 10 actions on the page (as opposed to three earlier).
4. Ability to show a related record as a card. For example you can show the details of the contact tagged in a quote as a card. This would help eliminate formula fields that are used often. It would also reduce reliance of using mouse over to see the compact layout of a record tagged in a lookup field.

Favorites for faster navigation

At a time people are working on multiple records, but some are more dear than the other. For some it might be reports, for others it might be a major deal that is taking a few months to close. Now you can easily bookmark and access them from anywhere within lightning interface. Click on the star icon while on the page and that’s it. It’ll be favorited till you decide you no longer need it on a priority basis.

Streams in chatter

I’m not really sold on this one from the the little bit I have seen. It seems to be an adaptation of topics. You can club multiple records together to create a stream and track any interactions happening on those records from within chatter.

Ported to lightning from classic

There are a lot of features that were there in the classic interface that have been ported over to lightning (finally!). Here are a few of them.

1. Forecasts (Collaborative)
2. Libraries (visible in the sidebar of chatter tab)
3. Knowledge
4. Send email action in all objects (almost)
5. Subscribe to reports
6. Funnel charts
7. Console interface (I’m not too convinced on this one)
8. Dynamic dashboards
9. Approval process section

I’ve also noticed some significant performance improvements, though it is yet to match the speed of classic. Opening records in a new browser tab is not as annoying and sluggish as it used to be, but I feel that there is still some room for javascript optimizations to reduce loading times.

For more details and discussion on the topic, visit Release Readiness group.