What’s the Happs with This New App

If you haven’t already heard of or deployed Salesforce’s new mobile app to your users, then you’re in luck! Here, we’ll discuss why you should make use of this tool for your users; we’ll also go over a few of the major updates in the new Salesforce app.

Why Use Salesforce Mobile?

Unless you’ve been unplugged in an underground bunker for the past decade, you’ve probably noticed everyone is walking around with a smartphone glued to their eyes or in their pocket. There’s a good reason for that! Smartphones have enabled us to take our jobs that once needed a desktop or laptop on the road. This is why Salesforce’s new mobile app released in Winter ‘20 is a great tool to utilize for both you and your users. Not to mention that it’s:

•  Free to Download – Using Salesforce’s new mobile app is free because it is included with every Salesforce License.
• Cross Platform – Whether your users rock an iOS or Android device, they can download it from the respective app stores.
• Plug and Play – After the app is downloaded, it works out of the box with no setup required on your users’ end.
• Offline Capable – Your users won’t be affected by lousy cellular signals or a lack of internet access because it works offline.
• Mirroring Your Lightning Experience – If your users are already comfortable using Lightning Experience, the app will already feel familiar to them.
• Easy to Setup – As an admin, it’s easy to setup and build pages for both the desktop and mobile versions of Salesforce.

Winter ‘20 Mobile Updates

Lightning Apps

Before the Winter ‘20 update, Salesforce’s mobile app experience left something to be desired. Sure, it was possible to navigate to most records you wanted to view, but the user interface was clunky and forced you to scroll through all the tabs to which you had access (unless otherwise defined by an admin).

Now, you’re able to use the App Launcher just like you would in the desktop Salesforce experience! This is great for creating a unified experience for users who will go from desktop to mobile and vice versa.

The best part is how easy it is to set up. Once you’ve completed steps 1 thru 3 click on New Salesforce Mobile App Quickstart in Setup. Go to App Manager, edit any lightning app in your org, head to App Options, and here you can set whether you want the app to appear for Desktop, mobile or both! After Saving, the app should now appear in the New Salesforce App.

Lightning Pages

Certainly most changes came to the overall look of the page when viewing a record on mobile, the way we build Lightning Pages, and how they can be customized for desktop, mobile or both!

These improvements are all about improving the user experience; this should improve user adoption as users can now log calls, emails, look-up key information about any given record … all on the go!

In the new version of the app, there are now more ways to customize the contents of the page. The first big change is that upon loading a record, the Highlights Panel is the first component your users will see.

This allows users to see the most important details about a given record without having to scroll much; this will improve their user experience. And, should the information they’re looking for not be included in the compact layout, they can still drill down into the record details.

Tabs on a record page now mirror their desktop counterparts, which is something we couldn’t change before as the only tabs available were the Chatter, Details and Related Tabs.

While these navigational improvements will improve the experience your users will have with the mobile app and Salesforce overall, the real secret sauce with the new mobile app update is the ability to show and hide components based on the form factor.

Now we can control what users can see on the desktop or on mobile. Want a report chart to only show on the desktop version of a record page? Would you like to show a screen flow for mobile use only? These can all be done now in Lightning App Builder, and you can even preview what the mobile experience will be like for our users.

Simple enough, right?

These are just the two main updates that happened with the recent mobile update. I encourage you to go play around with the mobile updates in a sandbox or playground. On top of that, here is a link to the Winter ‘20 release notes that contain all the changes made to mobile:
https://releasenotes.docs.salesforce.com/en-us/winter20/release-notes/rn_mobile.htm. And to say ahead of your Salesforce game, check out last week’s blog, Salesforce’s Top 12 Spring 2020 Features.

Need More Guidance? Give Us a Ring!

At Shift3 Technologies, we use a consultative approach to help you determine the best strategy to identify your challenges, implement appropriate solutions and enhance your systems. Frustrated with Salesforce? Learn to love it again with our 3-part blog series. For a free consultation, email [email protected] or call 559 560 3300 today.

This post was written by Jacob Aguilar, Salesforce Certified Administrator. Jacob has become a regular contributor to the Shift3 Technologies blog and has presented at CenCal Dreamin’ 2020 and will be a key presenter in the new California Trailblazer Series.

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