Upcoming Key Release Dates

For Salesforce admins, users, and developers—it’s Release time again! Salesforce has three major releases per year—and for 2021, here are those key dates: 

• November 5, 2020: Winter ‘21 Release
• March 9, 2021: Spring ‘21 Release
• July 13, 2021: Summer ‘21 Release

As the final two release weekends close in on us, we want to present our top ten favorite features for Spring ‘21.

1. Forecast Adjustments on the Salesforce Mobile App

What’s new with sales, you ask? Lots! If you want to adjust your sales forecasts, you no longer have to wait to get to your laptop. Salesforce’s mobile app now supports forecast adjustments! Previously, all mobile forecasts were only able to be read, not edit. (Note: There are small limitations.) 

• Only the Opportunity Revenue forecast type is available. No other forecast type is currently supported.
• You can adjust your forecasts, but not your subordinates’ forecasts.
• You can only edit adjustments, not remove them. 
• Changing the forecasting currency isn’t supported currently.
• Selecting whether to show or hide quote information isn’t supported currently.

2. Interaction Summaries

You can now document or take notes of client or partner interactions and share them with stakeholders in a compliant manner with the new Interaction Summaries feature. This change applies to Lightning Experience in Enterprise, Professional, and Unlimited Editions where Financial Services Cloud is enabled.

3. Einstein Conversation Insights

Video calls and meetings are the new norms, so Salesforce provides us with the useful feature that supports video calls. Now you can get the same insights and coachable moments for your video calls that you already get for phone calls. Conversation Insights users can access video support after Zoom is integrated, and can easily create and share groups of voice calls with call collections. Additionally, sales managers can access video call data in Conversation Insights dashboards.

4. Salesforce Meetings

A well-prepared sales team leaves the best impression. The Meeting Digest, part of

Salesforce Meetings, gives your sales reps a single page that they can use to gather and share information before a meeting starts. They get insights about who’s attending a meeting, reminders about meeting invitation responses, plus related record activity.

5. Salesforce Surveys

Salesforce Surveys has some new capabilities! Now users can schedule surveys, send reminders, or identify participants who can be invited again to a survey using actions in a Flow. Moreover, users or admins can gather focused data and gain actionable insights by sending surveys to specific participant groups using survey invitation rules. Users can also do the following:

• Use organization-wide email addresses defined for your Salesforce org to send surveys. 
• Validate how a participant responds to a short-text question in a survey. 
• Show participants their progress in a survey by inserting a progress bar.

6. Manual Sharing

Having to switch to Salesforce Classic to give specific users and user groups access to records is now history? Manual sharing in Lightning is here, and users now can share records without switching to Classic!

7. Quickly Find Portal Users When Changing Record Owners

When you want to give a portal user ownership of a record, you can now filter for customer portal users and partner users in the change owner window so you can efficiently find whomever you’re looking for. This change applies to Lightning Experience in all editions. Implement this tool by simply choosing a user type when changing owners to refine your search results.

8. Streamline Report Creation with Multi-Field Selection

Now creating a report will not take as much time as it used to. Multi-select allows you to drag multiple fields to your reports with a single action. Plus, you can now add or remove fields and columns and preview the results without delay.

9. Get Report Details Emailed in .xlsx Format

Now you are not limited to .xls and .csv as the format. Now, when exporting a report, you can select .xlsx, .xls, or .csv as a preferred format. This update will help to personalize your Reports.

10. Lightning Flow Updates

Flow Builder is an incredible automation tool that has helped admins and users automate business processes—and it’s now renamed Salesforce Flow. There’s so many exciting enhancements surrounding Flows; all of which apply to both Classic and Lightning. I’ll only go over a few here.

Now when a record is updated, you can access that record’s initial values.

Add a scheduled path to your Record Triggered Flow type.

Add multiple columns in the screen flow element called Beta version.

We’re Just Scratching the Surface

We hope this brief snapshot of our top Release Features helps you lean into this Spring ‘21 Release! If you haven’t already, we highly encourage you to read the release notes yourself (link below) and get hands-on in a sandbox! 

https://resources.docs.salesforce.com/230/latest/en-us/sfdc/pdf/salesforce_spring21_release_notes.pd

Is Your Org Ready for the Upcoming Release?

At Bitwise Technology Consulting, we use a consultative approach to determine the best strategy to identify your challenges, implement appropriate solutions and enhance your systems. Need to rekindle your users’ love for Salesforce? Check out this 5-minute read. For a free consultation, click here.

This post was written by Yemsrach Beshe, Salesforce Administrator at Bitwise Industries. You can find her binge-watching a good documentary on Netflix or hiking the great outdoors.

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