It’s Springtime for Salesforce

It’s that time of the year again and in case you haven’t had the chance to digest the release notes for Salesforce’s Spring ‘20 update slated to be generally available February 17, 2020, we’re going to cover 12 of the coolest upcoming features coming with it.

1. Clone Records Along with Related Records

Have you or your users ever wished you could clone an opportunity along with their Opportunity Contact Roles and Opportunity Products? Well, that’s now a thing! The Clone with Related action makes it easy to accomplish this. 
To use this feature, be sure to add the Clone with Related action to your page layouts.

2. Assign Tasks to a Queue

We can now let our users share their day-to-day workload and assign tasks to queues and take ownership of those tasks from the queue list view. This allows our users to work collaboratively and without having to wait for work to be delegated to them or reassigned to them.
In Setup, in the Quick Find box enter Queues, select Queues. From the Queues setup page, select New, and then create a queue and assign Task for the supported object.

3. Einstein Opportunity Scoring

AI is now a native part of Sales Cloud and it’s free! That means all Sales Cloud users will now have access to Einstein Opportunity Scoring! This will help your sales users prioritize which opportunities have a higher chance of closing and work on those first. 
All that needs to be done is follow the in-app prompt to get started with Einstein, or visit the Assisted Setup page in Lightning Experience Setup, click Turn It On.

4. URL Hacks

These were replaced with Actions when Lightning Experience first launched, however Salesforce has brought them back by letting us create buttons and links that are able to pass default field values to a new record!
Just create a new custom button or link that launches a new record with some prepopulated values, and place it on your page layouts like so:

5. Edit Cases From Hover

This is a nice time saver for users who work with cases. Users can now see a compact view of a case record from a list view when they hover over the case subject. From here, they can simply just view the record, edit or delete it!

6. Merge Duplicate Cases

Back in Summer ‘19, Salesforce brought us the ability to merge duplicate cases as a beta. However, now this feature is generally available! 

Just imagine if a customer or even a user submitted a case about the same incident multiple times or through multiple channels. This is a nightmare to handle, as many support users could potentially work on the multiple cases submitted, when in actuality, it’s the same one. This allows our support users to combine up to three duplicate cases so they are able to focus on what needs to be done that day!

From Setup, in the Quick Find box, enter Case Merge and then select it. From here, enable Merge Cases, and specify what happens with support users merge duplicate cases.

7. In-App Guidance

This is another feature that was released back in Summer ‘19, but it just got a whole lot better. In-App Guidance allows admins to create unique, tailored, in-app training for our users, and now we’re able to specifically target which profiles see which prompts. This level of fine tuning is great especially when you administer an org that can potentially have many different departments but still use a lot of the same objects.
From Setup, in the Quick Find box, enter and then select In-App Guidance. From here you can select multiple profiles with a limit of up to 10 profiles and permissions for each prompt.

Sometimes a video is worth thousands of words and because of this, we can now add a short video that demonstrates a complex process to docked prompts. This only further drives the message home and creates a tailored experience for our users!

From Setup, in the Quick Find box, enter and then select In-App Guidance. When adding a video to a docked prompt, simply enter the URL specified in the src attribute listed in the embed code from the video host.

8. Outlook & Gmail: Know Who Opted Out

Respecting our customers’ email preferences is a must and when sending emails in today’s world, our users need to know who has chosen to opt for specific kinds of emails such as marketing or sales emails, or even emails all together. Now both Gmail and Outlook integrations allow our users to see our contacts’ privacy settings from their inbox! 

A contact or lead’s email privacy preferences from Lightning Experience are shown in the integrations, no additional setup is needed!

9. Recycle Bin Improvements

I’m sure we were all ecstatic that the recycle bin was recently added to Lightning Experience back in Winter ‘20 and it’s gotten even better. Even though we had to select each individual item to delete, it was a step in the right direction and we didn’t have to traverse back to Classic just to empty the Recycle Bin. We are now able to empty our org’s Recycle Bin in a single click, and all being done from Lightning!
Simply open up the Recycle Bin in Lightning, and in the top right you should see a button to Empty Org Recycle Bin.

Not only did Salesforce allow us to empty the entire Recycle Bin from Lightning in Spring ‘20, but we can now also manage reports and dashboards in the Recycle Bin without switching to Classic!

10. Run Flows in System Mode

If you know your way around flows, then you probably know that how a flow is launched determines whether if the flow runs in the context of the user who initiated the flow or the system itself. Now, Salesforce, has given us the option to bypass the running user’s permissions by setting our flow to run in the system context.

This doesn’t mean that flows will be able to run rampant and wreak havoc across your org, as the flow still respects the org-wide defaults, role hierarchies, sharing rules, manual sharing, team, and territories in place but ignore object, field, or other permissions of the running user.
When you’re saving a flow, click Show Advanced, and for How to Run the Flow, select System Context with Sharing-Enforces Record-Level Access.

11. Reference a New Screen Flow Component Without Leaving the Editor

This one actually recently stumped me! I was creating a screen flow for our users, and knew I needed component visibility on several long text area components based on whether the running user checked its associated checkbox. I originally planned on doing it all in one screen, but realized for some reason I couldn’t set visibility based off the checkbox components I had just recently made. 

I reasoned to myself, maybe I can’t reference screen components if they’re on the same screen. Which led me to create a whole other screen to house the text area components … only to notice, had I simply saved, exited the screen editor and reopened, it would’ve updated and I could then accomplish my previous mission.

However, this one won’t be an issue now as we can now build screen fields and reference them to set component visibility, validate input, or provide help for another screen field at the same time!

12. Lightning Extension

I’ll admit it; I’m a dark mode fiend. That’s why I included this feature. The Lightning Extension, which is available for both Chrome and Firefox, allows us to gain access to some of the latest Lightning Experience features and try them before everyone else. One of these features is a dark theme for Salesforce, and dare I say, it’s beautiful. 

Simply download the Lightning Extension for your browser, and from the Lightning Extension features panel, choose which features to turn on. 
We also have control over which features are available for our users by going to Setup, enter and select Lightning Extension in the Quick Find box. From here, simply toggle the individual features you would like or disable the extension altogether.

Drop in the Bucket

These 12 features highlighted here are but a drop in the bucket compared to what’s in the Spring ‘20 release. That being said, I simply wanted to highlight some useful features I found digesting the Spring ‘20 release notes. If you haven’t already, I highly encourage you to read the release notes yourselves here and get hands on in a sandbox!

https://releasenotes.docs.salesforce.com/en-us/spring20/release-notes/salesforce_release_notes.htm

Spring to Reach Out

At Bitwise Industries, 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 866.442.0472 today.

This post was written by Jake Aguilar, Salesforce Certified Administrator. Jake presented an extended overview of Spring ‘20 Features at CenCal Dreamin’ 2020.

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