The Summer ’19 Salesforce release had some great new features. It’s worth reading back to make sure you’re making the most of Salesforce. We hosted a release webinar shortly before this to introduce the new features, which you can view on-demand here.
We combed the 500+ pages of release notes and chose our top six features from Summer ’19.
1. Free (to send) surveys
Anyone with the appropriate Survey object permissions can now create and send surveys. Each org gets 300 free responses. After that you can purchase an add-on response pack based on the number of responses you expect to receive.
2. Additional skills in skills-based routing
Additional skills are essentially nice-to-haves when routing cases. If no agent with all the defined skills, including additionals, becomes available within the designated time period, the additional skills become optional. The case is routed to the best-matched agent, even if they don’t have some (or all) of the additional skills.
3. Conditional instructions in macros
Macros allow users to complete repetitive tasks with a single click. But before they ran the same set of instructions, regardless of the user executing the macro. This release lets you specify instructions that are only executed if the record matches specific criteria. This would allow you, for example, to create a macro to send an email for case creation – depending on whether the case is Low, Medium or High priority.
4. Row level formulas BETA
While this is a beta feature and thus may never go Generally Available (GA), it’s too good to leave out. In the past, to include a specific calculation on every row of a report, you needed to add a custom formula field to the object being reported on. This has always felt suboptimal. It polluted the records with data that is only applicable when executing a particular report. And once you had a number of these they started to get in the way of the real data, especially when administering the object. Row level formulas let you create the formula to apply to each record where it belongs – on the report itself.
5. Max debug log size increased
In the Summer ’18 release, the maximum debug log size was increased to 5Mb. But this clearly still left a number of situations where the logs continued to be truncated. The maximum size is now 20Mb, which according to Salesforce will mean that 99.99% of logs will not be truncated. Hopefully you aren’t part of the 0.01%!
6. Deploy source format code to non-scratch orgs
One for the developers here, as the force:source:[deploy/retrieve/delete] commands exit beta and become GA. Previously to deploy to a non-source tracked org (anything other than a scratch org) you had to first convert to metadata API format and then deploy the converted source. One command instead of two turns into quite a time saver over the average developer’s working year!
Keir Bowden is CTO of BrightGen, a Certified Technical Architect and multi-time Salesforce MVP – you can find him on twitter @bob_buzzard.
Want to join Keir’s team? Find out about our open opportunities.