Salesforce Winter’16 Release-What’s in it for you?

Winter is coming and so is the much awaited Salesforce Winter’16 release. There are a plenty of new features available in the preview to raise your spirits. Sandbox customers have the opportunity to get early access to preview and test the latest features and functionalities. Salesforce’s most recent and the biggest change “The Lightning Experience” is the re-envisioned desktop experience to support the sales process. Another change that has been announced is that Connect for Outlook would no longer be available, so customers have to migrate to Salesforce to use Outlook.

Let’s have a look at some of the highlights available in the release

New Lightning Experience

Lightning Experience can be used to transform Salesforce CRM and extend to service, apps, platform, and more. Here are some of the features that make Lightning Experience the go-to interface for smart selling:

• New record layouts to focus on what users can do
• Turbocharged list views to filter and visualize data
• Beautiful dashboards to add more components in a row
• Sleek report views to filter, slice and view important data

Bulkified Process Builder

Processes can now bucket as many SOQL queries as possible. It means that a large number of records can be updated quicker, eliminating the need of apex code. Processes can now execute multiple groups of scheduled actions, such as-

• Creating a related contract record after the closing date
• Sending a follow-up email to the account owner after the last modified date
• Sending a satisfaction survey 10 days after the closing date

Sales Wave Analytics App

You can now share Wave visualizations across your Salesforce experience by integrating them into Communities and Lightning, clone lenses, and create open-ended date filters. Custom menus and more detailed lists give you a quicker access to your Wave assets. You can also:

• Securely share Wave Analytics Apps with Community Partners and Customers
• Use SAQL to build powerful queries
• Access Wave Analytics dashboards using Wave REST API to access large amount of data

Template Extensibility

You can now easily customize your community by updating your templates and making them compatible with Lightning technology though there are many limitations. The benefits include the ability to create custom pages, add components to pages, use custom Lightning components, and expose additional Salesforce objects. Also, there is no need to use Site.com Studio, except for a few site configuration settings. You can also:

• Extend your Napili Community by creating record list view and record detail pages
• View information about your current template version for Koa, Kokua, and Napili templates
• Add the new Language Picker to let guest users select their preferred language on a community page

Chatter –Rich Text Posts and Questions

You can easily format posts with bold, italic, underlined characters, and bulleted & numbered lists. Also, Chatter Questions now support the display of Similar Questions and Knowledge Articles inline while typing the question text. Apart from these features you can-

• Freeze the sharing of a file in its current state without removing any existing shares
• Add the Files Related List to Page Layouts for opportunities, accounts, cases, leads, custom objects, and many other objects
• No longer see updates from people you don’t follow

Next generation Journey Builder

You can now create journeys that go beyond traditional marketing activities with the newly added integration for Sales Cloud and Service Cloud activities. Journey Builder allows you to:

• Set a specific time after the waiting period that gives you more control over the timing of the next activity.
• Set up Contact Model, create a new Interaction, build a new Entry Event for that Interaction and more with inter-modal directions
• Create and schedule a new Event when multiple Events or Interactions using the Event source.

Want to make the most of the latest Salesforce Updates?

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