Salesforce Winter’19 release is on. Not surprisingly, it comes with loads of new features and functionality. Salesforce is always known to pack in exciting new features and functionality at this time of year, and true to form, doesn’t disappoint.
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New Display Density Settings Fit More on a page
The rise of smartphone-powered mobility gives premium to screen real estate. When Lightning was introduced, 75% zoom was optimal. The new “Compact” view moves field labels from top of fields to side, and also brings down the amount of horizontal white space between fields. The net result is users having greater control over how they can view data on record detail pages without having to change the page layout, and saving up to 30% screen space.
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Mass Assign New Owners
The ability to change the ownership of Leads, Cases and custom objects, in bulk, from a list view is a boon for admins who are always hard-pressed for time.
Changes in the composition of the team are commonplace in an extremely fluid environment, where people change jobs on the fly, and even incumbents get reassigned. Hitherto, changing team members and ownership was a tedious process, with no workaround except manually changing it one by one across records. The Winter’19 release now brings a Change Owner page-level button, enabling admins to mass assign a new owner for up to 200 selected leads, cases, or custom objects in a list view or related list in standard table mode, or in Related List Quick Links.
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Recover Unsaved Text
Multitasking is a way of life for marketers. Nothing is more annoying for a busy marketer when s/he finds the Lightning Experience session timed out. Worse, when the Lightning Experience session is interrupted, be it due to long periods of inactivity or disruption in connection, users lose unsaved data. Now such data is saved as drafts. When a session is interrupted, users may return to the page to copy any unsaved text, like a Chatter post or Note.
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Changes to Field Tracking Data History
Salesforce guarantees to retain field history data only up to 18 months. While this wasn’t enforced until now, going forward users would need to purchase the Field Audit Trail add-on to avoid losing field history data after 18 months. With Field Audit Trail enabled, users may set a policy to retain archived field history data up to 10 years from the date data is archived.
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New Search Capabilities for Easy and Fast Search
Capturing data is one thing, but finding it when required is quite another.
The new list view search feature allows users to search within a list view, making data search easy and fast. Users are spared the hassles of having to create a list view and set the filters, and still search manually for the exact data required. The search bar now works across all applicable fields for all the records in the list, even if specific columns are not visible. Certain fields are still not searchable, but it is possible to filter or sort those fields instead.
Likewise, the quick search functionality makes it easy to search for reports, dashboards and folders straight from the reports or dashboards tab. This resolves a key block of searching within reports and dashboards.
Applying these new functionalities in opportunities, leads, contacts or accounts also reduces the size of the list and spares the user the need to scroll the page to find the required records.
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Improvements in Email
The biggest bane of email conversations is the unidirectional nature of the message. There is no way to know when the recipient has opened or read the email. Salesforce now launches a new Email Tracking feature which allows users to not only see if the receiver has opened the email, but also keep track of how many times they opened the message. Users may track email opens in the Activity timeline of records.
A new bounced email notification gives users indication as to when an email has bounced for any contacts or leads.
The intuitive Quick text feature allows inserting a preformatted piece of text or merged fields. This functionality becomes even more powerful in the Winter’19 release. Users can now use QuickText when creating an email, adding a call record, task or event in Salesforce Lightning. Sending a standard email reply becomes much easier.
It also becomes possible to use existing Visualforce email templates in Lightning.
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More Powerful and Dynamic Reports
A key USP of Salesforce is attention to detail. Lightning report builder now allows users to set the currency on a report, doing away with a significant pain-point of having to convert figures manually when wanting to review financial figures in other currencies.
Lightning now allows edit and view of joined reports, and also using joined reports as a source for dashboards.
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Better Analytics
The Winter’19 release does not disappoint on the analytics front either. Einstein analytics gets a ton of updates, making it much more powerful than before.
The Lightning usage app becomes more dynamic, offering insights on key metrics such as page load times, browser usage stats, when and where users switch back to classic and many other intuitive stats.
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Other Improvements
Several other improvements are available in the Winter’19 release.
For one, marketers’ lives have become much easier, as they can now Sync Pardot campaigns with Salesforce.
The Service cloud gets a significant improvement, with Einstein Bots now able to use auto-launched Flows.
Login becomes less of a bother, with Salesforce Community Cloud members now able to log in with a phone number, email or other identifiers. Several new community cloud themes add to the zing, and it is now also possible to share a theme with the community or through the App Exchange.
In the service cloud, LiveMessage gets a few notable updates including Facebook Messenger connections. Users may access LiveAgent Setup in LEX. It is now possible to route work to agents using both queues and skills simultaneously in the same Org. Skill-based routing beta is now also available for a live agent. Another intuitive new feature is connecting YouTube channel to service cloud to track support cases.
Salesforce Surveys get enriched with new question types such as CSAT, Sliders, and Picklists.
Read more about Salesforce Winter ‘19 Highlights – Reinforcing Customer Relationships
Overall, the Winter’19 release makes Salesforce much easier and better. Many of these new features are enabled by default while others require enabling or additional configuration before use. Salesforce has constantly set its own benchmarks as the leader of the pack, and true to form is crossing its own benchmarks.
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