Clive Platt and I presented our traditional webinar reviewing the key changes of the Salesforce Winter 20 release. You can view the recording on our YouTube channel. If you can’t spare that much time at the moment, here are the top seven features that we uncovered.
1. New Salesforce Mobile App
The big news of the Winter 20 release was the new Salesforce mobile app. The new app supports the App Launcher and allows admins to create a unified experience across devices. The Lightning App builder now supports conditional rendering of components based on device. You can activate pages for desktop, mobile or all devices. The new mobile app is opt-in so users won’t get any unexpected surprises. Their previous mobile experience is still available in the Mobile Only app.
2. Recycle Bin
This much loved feature finally make its debut in the Lightning Experience. No more switching over to Classic if you delete a record and then suddenly realise you needed it. The recycle bin in LEX appears as a tab so you access it via the App Launcher – or add it to the selected tabs for your app(s). One key difference is that you can’t restore reports or dashboard via the LEX recycle bin. So you may find yourself still needing to switch back to Classic on the odd occasion.
3. Prompts
Prompts provide in app guidance for training purposes or to onboard new users. They contain content specific to your implementation and problem domain. They can contain action buttons to link to URLs providing more information, such as Trailhead modules or internal training content.
4.Opportunity Contact Roles
In the Winter 20 release of Salesforce, Opportunity Contact Roles are customisable. They support custom fields and page layouts, validation rules, and Apex triggers. So if you need to capture more information about the relationship between a Contact and an Opportunity, you can now capture this on the standard sObject rather than having to create a custom solution. For example: when the Contact first became involved in the deal or when they moved on.
5. Row Level Formulas
Probably our second favourite feature from the release. Previously, if you wanted to display information derived from multiple fields in a single row on a report, you had to create a custom formula field on the sObject you were reporting on and add this to the report. An extremely common example of this is a daily scheduled report that includes the number of days until an opportunity is due to close – there must be hundreds of identical custom fields in Salesforce instances around the world calculating this piece of information. With row level formulas, you can define the formula and add it to the report like a regular field.
6. Recalculate Formulas of Multiple Records
One for the coders – recalculate formulas on multiple sObject in-memory records using the new Formula class. Note that if the records don’t have all the fields required for the formulas to be evaluated, then SOQL queries will be consumed to retrieve the additional data required.
7. Conditional Rendering in Flow
And finally, one for the no-coders. Screen components in Lightning Flows can be hidden or shown depending on whether it matches the configured conditions.