My presentation recapping some announcements from Dreamforce 2016 and Winter '17 release features. This is not an exhaustive list. https://www.meetup.com/Nashville-Salesforce-Developer-User-Group/events/234768432/
8. 1.Name of Selected App (e.g. Sales)
2.Custom Branding (e.g. blue border
color)
3.App Launcher
4.Menu Dropdown
1.Create new records
2.Access recent records
3.Access recent list views
New Lightning Navigation!
12. All error fields display
in error tooltip
in button panel.
User can click field
name to jump to
section in form with
error.
Helpful on long forms
as user can quickly
navigate to issue rather
than hunt for it.
38. If you add a report chart to a group, and the report is on standard Salesforce objects,
you can set the chart to scope itself to only the records related to the Group.
For example, you could show the closed value of Opportunities related to the group.
44. BREAKING CHANGE!!!
Converted Account Id,
Converted Contact Id, and
Converted Opportunity Id
were temporarily available until Summer '16
in Process Builder, however, those are
unsupported references that shouldn't be
used and have been removed starting in
Winter '17.
Knowledge Article
The big announcement of Dreamforce 2017 was “Salesforce Einstein”. Pitched as upcoming technology built into the platform that will recommend actions based on analyzing your data. The goal is to make AI simple for everyone to use.
Salesforce Einstein is being built out right now. There are a few pilots such as Predictive Lead Scoring and Opportunity Insights that recommend actions to marketers on who are the best leads and recommend actions to sales reps on opportunities that may be at risk. All of these recommendations based on Salesforce Einstein analyzing your historical data and making predictions based on the trends and algorithms.
Learn more on Trailhead, the fun and easy way to learn Salesforce.
Another big announcement at Dreamforce is Salesforce’s acquisition of Quip. This is a document / spreadsheet collaboration product built for mobile and desktop. Brett Taylor, former CTO of Facebook, runs this company. Salesforce talked about future integrations to allow Salesforce data be included as merge fields into the documents. For basic use cases I can see this contending with Drawloop and Conga, etc. A use case pitched in the keynote is using Salesforce merge fields to retrieve data from a report into a Quip spreadsheet that rolls up into a Quip document for management. Or to pull in opportunity or account information into a SOW.
Team members can collaborate on the document, commenting, email notifications, versioning. Comparable to Confluence and Google Docs in some ways.
Gone is the vertical navigation bar and we come back to the familiar horizontal menu. But this time this menu is supercharged for productivity! Each tab has a drop menu that lets you quickly create a new record, or click on recently viewed records, or navigate to recently viewed lists.
Gaining feature parity with Classic, help tooltips now supported in Lightning.
Gaining feature parity with Classic, collapsible page layout sections now supported in Lightning.
Gaining feature parity with Classic, “Save & New” button now supported in Lightning.
New account settings to enable.
News shows just that, trending articles from news sources about the account and its executives. Executives are based on what Salesforce (Data.com?) knows and you don’t have to have the person added as a contact to receive news about executives.
Also receive news on the Contact page layout.
When creating accounts, the name is an autocomplete box (guessing it pulls from Data.com. Don’t think you need to pay extra, this is just built into LEX). You’ll also notice the account logo.
If you choose one of the autocomplete results then other information Salesforce knows about (again, probably pulled from Data.com) is copied into the form for you. This is a huge time saver for sales reps. To receive regular updates, consider purchasing Data.com Premium.
Salesforce now auto geocodes standard address fields for Accounts, Contacts, and Leads. No more having to rely on third-party services or apps that you have develop integrations for.
In Lightning, you can customize the “Send Email” standard action and swap out the old “From” text field with the new “From” picklist field which is dynamically maintained picklist by Salesforce of the user’s email address plus the Email-2-Case address plus other Organization-Wide Email addresses the user has access to.
Email Attachments are now shown in the Chatter Feed for the Case.
HeyWire acquisition. Similar in concept to Live Chat, but instead of web chat the agent is supporting and responding to customers via messaging apps (text, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Twitter, etc.)
New social studio channel: Instagram
Records in Kanban view can be edited or deleted without navigating away. Clicking Edit link will open the pop up form for user to make edits and save record.
When dragging and dropping records between columns (e.g. statuses, stages) and a validation error occurs, Salesforce now presents the edit form highlighting the errors so that the user can correct issues right there without navigating away from the Kanban board.
Kanban views now supported on Leads.
Kanban views now supported on Campaigns.
Vote for idea to support Kanban list views for custom objects. It’s on the roadmap!
Chatter now supports inline images and code snippets! To let people add code snippets, must grant them new System permission.
Chatter now supports inline images and code snippets! To let people add code snippets, must grant them new System permission.
Can now attach up to 10 files per Chatter post! No more adding multiple comments just to add a bunch of files to a conversation.
Chatter Live is here. When you click into the comment field of a post that subscribes you to begin receiving real-time updates to that specific Chatter conversation. If other people are commenting on that post then you’ll see those messages appear in the thread instantly – no more sitting and refreshing the page repeatedly to check for updates.
Works in Chatter groups too!
Group managers when making an Announcement post can now choose to have an email sent to all members immediately, regardless the user’s email notification preference for that group. Users must be granted new System permission to be able to send the emails since this is an easy way to spam people.
Using the Lightning App Builder, you can edit the Chatter Group page to add Report Charts. Create a report with a chart like you normally would, navigate to the Lightning App Builder, drag the ‘Report Chart’ component onto the page then you’ll be able to select a report for the chart component to display. Supposedly you can further filter the report to just records that are related to the Chatter Group.
Make your processes modular! You can reduce repetitive setup of actions in your processes by putting common logic/actions into a process that will be invoked on-demand by other processes. Processes now have one of two ways to be kicked off. They can either be started by create/update record events or on-demand by another process (but not both!).
New ISCLONE() function for workflow rules to know if the record being created is a clone. Previously, this was only able to be known via Apex Trigger.
When making changes to sharing rules, Salesforce now locks just the object that is having sharing rules changed on. This means you can have sharing rules recalculated among multiple objects simultaneously.
For rules that are shared with public groups or roles and those that might have special nuances like Account + Opportunity + Case rules, multiple objects might lock at the same time like they did before.
For rules that are shared with public groups or roles and those that might have special nuances like Account + Opportunity + Case rules, multiple objects might lock at the same time like they did before.
In the browser of who will be testing as the guest site user, add a cookie with name “debug_log” and value “debug_log”. You may have to use a browser extension to let you easily create the cookie. Without this cookie, even if in Setup you have setup Debug Logs to monitor the guest site user then no logs will actually be captured. Salesforce made this change allegedly for performance reasons.
Salesforce released an open-source project of visualforce and apex code to help admins manage custom metadata records. This app lets the admin upload a csv file to upsert the custom metadata records.
Beta in Winter ‘17, Salesforce released new lightning base components. This is a huge improvement for developers as it brings feature parity to the speed and ease of Visualforce. The components already generate the correct HTML and CSS to be styled in SLDS to look pretty.
Developer Preview in Winter ‘17 (only available in developer edition orgs), Salesforce has released new JavaScript code for use in Lightning Components to simplify and reduce the amount of boilerplate code needed to query and save records to the database. This also introduces a shared record cache to further improve page and app performance.
Lightning Components can now be exposed as publisher actions. This is part of how Salesforce is supporting the migration from JavaScript and URL buttons that were all the rage in Classic but not supported in LEX. Developers can put their customization logic that previously occurred in JavaScript or URLs to occur in Visualforce or Lightning Component pages.
As soon as Salesforce introduced Duplicate Data Management, did you ever want to on-demand look for duplicates in Salesforce rather than wait until the user had tried to create a record? Now you can with this new SOAP API method! You pass in some information and Salesforce will use the Duplicate Rules you’ve setup to find duplicate match results. You could build your own auto-merge utility, build more sophisticated reports, be creative! Want to do this from Apex? Simply use SOAP API wrapper class generated from Wsdl2Apex.