The much-awaited release notes of the Salesforce Spring ’17 release is out, complete with 452 pages of features!
Salesforce thrives on continuous development, and the Spring ‘17 release does not disappoint. There is greater integration of artificial intelligence, several additions that make the dashboards and reports more intuitive, enhancements to Community workspaces that make community management tasks easier, and much more.
Einstein Gets Better
The first thing that strikes anyone who looks at the release notes is the dominance of Lightning, and also the prominence to Einstein.
As expected, Sales Cloud Einstein, the biggest announcement in the last Dreamforce, gets stronger with fresh updates. Einstein infuses Salesforce with Artificial Intelligence capabilities, and the Spring ‘17 release infuses Einstein with several additional features.
Predictive Lead Scoring: The Spring ‘17 release offers predictive lead scoring or analyzing lead history on a periodic basis, to deliver a dynamic lead scoring model, a big leap from the traditional method of using marketing automation tools such as Pardot. The process of analyzing lead and opportunity data to identify leads that turn into opportunities can get very complicated, especially with multiple segments of prospects in the mix. The changing marketers and the ever expanding product range make single point data analysis obsolete in a short while anyway. Einstein constantly learns from the available data and makes continuous adjustments to the Lead Scoring, ensuring it stays relevant.
Automated Activity Capture: Einstein gets more power as an automated assistant. Going forward, Einstein would add email as activities in Salesforce, or as Calendar events, automatically when using Google or Microsoft Office 365.
Opportunity Insights: Presently, Salesforce offers three insights: deal predictions, follow-up reminders, and key moments. Einstein pulls in data from activity associated with the Opportunity, to send automated messages or any other set task. Einstein also analyzes news about a company and displays them on the homepage.
Unabated Customization in the Offing
A significant feature of Spring ‘17 is the significant thrust on customization. A new personalized Wave home page offers custom app navigation, new chart types, and much more. Updates to the record Page offers admins much-needed page layout flexibility, with a host of new templates.
It will now be possible to add related list components anywhere on the Lightning page layout, and even build custom related components to show data from parent record and other lookup fields. Such functionality facilitates the seamless modification of related records and allows admins to develop pages the way they want it.
The ‘company highlights’ feed feature allows users to create their own feeds with streams and offers an effective way to share posts. It also becomes possible to create custom groups for any use case, and also filter questions in group feeds. Assigning record-type and location criteria makes it possible to filter criteria-based audiences.
A new permanent utility bar may be customized by adding different Lightning Component utilities of choice.
Powerful Functionality
The Spring ‘17 release offers several performance enhancements.
The improvements in tasks, approvals and other sales features in Salesforce1 allow sales professionals to sell more efficiently. The Salesforce Authenticator gets a design update that makes it easier to read notifications at a glance. Lightning gets a slick new Lightning component that enables navigating through the account hierarchy to see the current account and customize the columns that appear in the accounts.
The ability to relate a contact to multiple accounts, a big new feature launched recently, gets further enhancements. It is now possible to link a person’s account to multiple business accounts, and also add custom buttons and actions .to relationship objects between contact and accounts. Fresh updates to duplicate management allow users to set up proactive messaging to identify duplicates, thereby keeping instances clean.
There are significant improvements in quote updates as well. Users may now go directly to a quotes tab that organizes all of the Quotes in one place. A Kanban view organizes and displays quotes by their status. Chatter is now enabled on Quotes, facilitating direct collaboration, with feed updates.
Several other small improvements nevertheless offer a big leap in productivity. For instance, users can now add more than one product at a time to Opportunities. They can also search for different products and add it from the same page, without losing the previous selections. Dashboards now get a little “expand” icon that opens up a larger version, and new Funnel or Scatter Chart component types. Search may now be limited to a specific object. For instance, when typing “Accounts,” an option to limit that search to just Accounts comes up automatically.
Spring ‘17 caters to mobility in a big way as well. Creating, editing and updating update Salesforce records directly from the mobile device become easier. The new Field Service Lightning iOS mobile app offers all the required functionality to field service technicians at their fingertips.
Security
The Spring 2017 release introduces new authentication flows and identity management features for IoT devices.
Another noteworthy improvement relates to encryption. The encryption check runs faster with Spring ‘17 compared to before. It is now possible to reference encrypted fields within formula fields. There is also an option to apply custom encryption key on search and data indexes.
Overall, the latest updates brought about by Salesforce Spring 2017 release enhance the files experience to offer more functionality with less friction. True to form, it gets better with every release and summer 2017 promises to be even better, building on the new features and improvements launched in Spring 2017.
With each release promising something new for users, Salesforce is reinforcing its position as world’s number one CRM. Contact us now to learn more about Suyati’s Salesforce expertise.
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