Spring ’15 Release Notes: The SFDC’s New Year Gift!

Yes, we guessed it right! All that we desired for the scheduled Spring’15 release in our wish-list is almost there in the final release notes preview by SFDC. Salesforce came up with the Christmas & New Year’s Gift well in advance-on the 23rd of December, 2015 with the due release notes preview, anticipated in the 1st week of the New Year.

The Release Overview

With more than 250 features, the new Spring ’15 release enables you to collaborate with your customers, partners, and employees in a whole new way, right from all your devices including tabs, mobiles and desktops. Have a look:

Spring ’15 Release Highpoints

This massive release can help you discover new opportunities across the entire Salesforce platform-Sales, Marketing, Service, Community and Analytics Clouds. Let’s have a glimpse at the release highlights across each Cloud:

Service Cloud

With enhanced Service Cloud, you can get:

• Smart and Simple Agent Console for Service that sends more relevant cases to the suitable agent, improving agent productivity with faster and easier resolution process.
• New Case Feed to help your agents to create, manage, and view cases in a more streamlined approach, just like a Chatter feed.
• Salesforce Knowledge to validate if a particular article is the right solution for a case and displays most searched articles.
• Open Computer-Telephony Integration (CTI) for easy integration of your systems with Salesforce, without installing adapter programs on call centre users’ machines.
• Social Customer Service which is an integration between Radian6 and the Salesforce Service Cloud; to help your agents engage with customers by responding to cases created from social-networks like Twitter and Facebook.
• Organization Sync that lets you create a secondary and synced Salesforce setup where users can work when your primary setup is unavailable during maintenance and planned upgrades.

Community Cloud

With enhanced Community Cloud, you can get:

• Service Communities, Chatter Questions & Answers, and Ideas to help your customers help themselves. They can post questions and get answers from other customers or support agents. They can also post, vote for, and comment on innovative ideas.
• Chatter Question-to-Case that enables moderators to escalate questions in Chatter to cases, making it easier to track and resolve customers’ issues much faster.
• New Community Management Console that includes Community Analytics which enables community managers to track community growth and activity.
• Community Moderation to help Community Managers to quickly and easily review on-the-fly content in one location.
• Community Builder/Designer to simplify community designing process, and let you customize and brand your pages.
• Community Templates with new features such as reCAPTCHA for security, Reputation Leaderboard, and User Settings View where users can update personal settings.

Sales Cloud

With enhanced Service Cloud, you can get:

• New Sales Path to help reps to advance prospects to further sales-cycle stages-through sales engagement tools
• Email Connect that integrates Salesforce and Microsoft to let you bring the entire Salesforce experience into the outlook web, on any device.
• Salesforce App for Outlook to help reps keep contacts and events in sync.
• Duplicate Alerts and Blocking generally available with real time duplicate alerting, reporting, and blocking, for qualitative CRM data.

Marketing Cloud

With enhanced Marketing Cloud, you can get:

• Import Accounts and Contacts which is a new widget that enables marketers to import contacts from sources like LinkedIn, Gmail, Google Sheets, Sugar and Act.
• DKIM Signing Outbound Email that lets marketers to put a digital signature in the emails sent from Salesforce; to ensure the authorisation by your organisation.
• Notes (Beta) that allows users to add rich-text notes to records, to help them create objective notes, relate notes to multiple records, search notes, create tasks from notes and report on notes.
• Social Studio that helps marketers add Social Listening and Analytic Capabilities to Content Marketing and engagement-all within a single application. This enables marketers to use social insights to drive marketing decisions, and generate social leads.

Analytics Cloud

With Newest Salesforce Cloud-Analytics Cloud makes analytics available all across the Salesforce instance. You can:

• Explore data of all types.
• Access data even from your mobile device to know your customers from anywhere.
• Integrate your Salesforce Data as well as any other data source seamlessly with analytics Cloud.

Salesforce1

New Lightning Process Builder is the latest enhancement to the Salesforce1 platform that helps companies grow faster. You can:

• Build enterprise workflows.
• Automate complex processes, in just a few clicks.
• Send follow-up email reminders.
• Organize vendor procurement.

With lots of new features and cutting-edge introductions around all the Clouds, Salesforce Spring ’15 Release can prove to be a massive one. Hope these highlights help you identify the features critical for your organization. With more development on the Spring ’15 Release, I will be sure to keep you updated with our Spring ’15 Release Special Series of Blogposts.

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Disclaimer: Salesforce, Service Cloud, Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Community Cloud, Analytics Cloud, Salesforce1, Salesforce Lightning, etc. are all trademarks of Salesforce.com Inc.