The Spring ’17 Salesforce Release spanned almost 500 pages. We summarised our top five features at the time, which are still important today. If you haven’t yet moved to Lightning experience, here are a few features worth making the switch for. We can help you get make the move in under five weeks.
1. Setup Opens in a New Tab
If, like our consultants, your job is configuring and developing Salesforce rather than using it, you’ll be used to opening five tabs to change five objects. Up until the Spring ’17 release, this meant switching out of the Lightning Experience back to Salesforce Classic setup. But now it’s easy! Choose the the All Setup option from the Setup menu to open a new tab – there’s even a handy icon to remind you!
2. Assign Record Pages by App
We’ve been able to assign page layouts by Record Type and Profile since forever. But Spring ’17 took this to another level for the Lightning Experience. Pages can now be assigned by Record Type, Profile and App. So when your Service Manager gets the Account page setup just as she wants it, the Sales Manager isn’t affected.
3. Filter Reports via URL Parameters in Lightning Experience
It was never supported by Salesforce, but we all used URL hacks in Salesforce Classic to pass filter parameters to a report. When Lightning Experience came along, URL hacks didn’t work, which meant users had to switch back to Classic to run the reports, and often they’d forget to switch back when they were done. Since Spring ’17, report filtering via URL parameters not only works but is officially supported!
4. Kanban all the Views!
We talked about Kanban views in a previous post. In Spring ’17, they expanded the feature further – so if you’re in a List View, click the List icon to see if you can Kanban it.
5. Custom Healthcheck Baseline
The Setup Healthcheck Tool was introduced in Spring ’16 and we were big fans from the outset. Nothing is more important that the security of your data. Salesforce used to pre-define the baseline measurement for this tool. This meant that if you needed a higher minimum standard (working a regulated industry, for example), you had to check each area manually to ensure that you hadn’t fallen into the no man’s land between your minimum and the default. Now, simply export the standard baseline, modify it to your more stringent requirements, and import it back in!
Summary
Choosing just five features was rather a challenge, given the sheer volume in the Spring ’17 release. If you’d like to find out about our upcoming Salesforce Release Webinar, take a look at our events page.
Keir Bowden is CTO of BrightGen, a Certified Technical Architect and multi-time Salesforce MVP – you can find him on twitter @bob_buzzard.