Every year, Salesforce rolls out three major releases with enhancements and new features for their product. These releases appear seasonally in spring, summer, and winter. With Salesforce Release Notes, you can find brief, high-level descriptions of the implemented changes as well as tips to help you get started.
A major part of Salesforce’s plan for innovation is remaining engaged with their community. They use their IdeaExchange with a Reddit style upvote/downvote system to collect and evaluate ideas for future releases. This is a great place to share your ideas for product updates or suggest new features, as well as give feedback about the features being suggested by the community.
Since we’ve just passed the Salesforce Summer ‘19 release, here are the changes we’re most excited about and how we’re implementing them at Formstack.
Did you know? Formstack has a similar idea site you can use to provide feedback, thoughts, and ideas for future product enhancements!
Get ready for lightening!
A lot of the features coming out of the summer release are built for the Lightning Experience, so you’re going to want to make sure you and your team are prepared. If you haven’t already, take the time to walk through the Lightning Experience Transition Assistant. This will guide you through the transition to Lightning in three phases:
Discover
In this phase, you’ll learn about the new tools, features, and benefits you’ll be able to access once you make the switch. You’ll also get some helpful information about how ready your org is for the switch using their “Lightning Readiness Check.”
Roll Out
This phase will help you prepare your Salesforce users and your org by showing how to turn on key Lightning Experience features and adjusting existing customizations.
Optimize
For the last phase, you’ll get access to tools and information that will help you drive user adoption across your team.You should feel fully prepared at this step to turn off Salesforce Classic.
Here at Formstack, we’re currently going through this transition process. A lot of staff are already loving Lightning. Change is hard, but Salesforce is doing what they can to help you team make a seamless switch.
Note: If you’re having trouble creating buy-in for Salesforce Lightning, you might benefit from some of the tips in this article.
Our favorite features.
Now that we’ve had a little bit of time to play with the new features from the Salesforce Summer ‘19 release, we have a few favorites we want to gush about here.
Feature: Enhanced Related Lists
Why we love it: These updated lists give us more control over our related list display. Now, we can change the number of records displayed, add, resize, and sort columns, show and hide the action bar, wrap text, and more!
Feature: Expanded Navigation Bar
Why we love it: It may seem small, but expanding the number of recent items shown in the menu from three to five is pretty useful for us. We have several users in our Salesforce org. For us, expanded navigation means you can see your most recent pages even when other team members are working in Salesforce.
Feature: Notification Builder
Why we love it: Here at Formstack, we jump on any opportunity to customize our tools. Now, we aren’t limited to the standard notifications predefined by Salesforce. We have full control of our notifications so we can create what we need when we need it.
Read Next: The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up Your Salesforce Org
Looking to the future.
We’re still transitioning all of our team members to Lightning, so there are a few things we haven’t had the chance to try out yet. We’re big Pardot fans, so we’re looking forward to using the Einstein Behavior Scoring Data available in the process builder. As a workplace productivity platform, we love anything that helps us automate our work, and this new feature should help us cut down on some manual tasks, like assigning leads or posting to Chatter.
Now that we’ve dove into the Salesforce Summer ‘19 release, we’re anxiously awaiting the Salesforce Winter ‘20 release. We plan to make our team Lightning-ready before the roll out, and you should too! Stay up to date about future Salesforce changes, Formstack product releases, and much more by subscribing to our blog.
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