Although it feels very premature to be thinking about Spring already, before the holiday season has even arrived, you will know by now that things move quickly in the world of Salesforce. And so, despite it only being mid-December, we must already turn our attention to February’s upcoming Spring ’15 release.
We can expect the official release notes to land on Monday 22nd December. That’s when we get official confirmation of what has made it into the release. But before then pre-release orgs are now available, and that means that the traditional ‘treasure hunt’ to unearth new features is now on!
So here is a very quick summary of some of the features we have seen in the pre-release orgs so far (with a good deal of help from Rakesh Gupta who, as usual, is ahead of the crowd on this one):
- Flow Triggers/Process Builder: The ability to trigger headless flows from workflow rules is now generally available. But where is the Process Builder? Although not seen in pre-release orgs, we are told this will be going GA for the live release. (Thanks to Peter Churchill for the info.) If you need a reminder as to why the Process Builder will be a truly revolutionary admin tool, give this a read.
- Duplicate Management: We wrote a couple of months ago about the potential of this Winter ’15 pilot feature, and it looks like it has now made it to GA. Define your matching rules and duplicate rules to ensure your org’s data is kept clean.
- Native Google Maps Integration: We let you know a little about this feature in November, and it’s fair to say we don’t yet know much more than that. When enabled, standard address fields display an embedded Google Map, but so far we haven’t been able to work out the address completion suggestion feature.
- Report Notifications: There is now the ability to enable report notification subscriptions for users. We look forward to hearing more about this when the release notes are out.
- User Success Journeys: This feature allows admins to build customised journeys to help guide users on how to use Salesforce and Salesforce1. An information message in Setup says this is only available for US-based orgs at the moment.
- Sales Path: Part of the new Sales Cloud1 offering, Sales Path allows you to create visual guided selling processes to help coach users through the sales cycle by displaying certain key fields and informational messages depending on the opportunity stage. This appears to only be live for the mobile app at the moment. If you didn’t catch a glimpse of this in the Dreamforce product keynote, check it out now.
- Notes: There is a completely new UI for Notes. It’s Chatter-friendly in that users can follow notes and they can be shared with users or into groups.
- Macros: Announced during Dreamforce, macros are sets of instructions and actions which can interact with components in the Salesforce Console, to mimic and automate agent actions. You can read a little more from the PM here.
- Add Record in Chatter Group: Records can now be associated with and added into Chatter groups.
- Salesforce1 Import Contacts: There is a new setting which will allow users to import contacts into Salesforce1 directly from their mobile device.
- Emoticons in Chatter Feed: The one we’ve all been waiting for – your users can now litter the org’s Chatter feed with inane smilies 😉
What hidden gems have we missed? Sign up for your pre-release org now and let us know what you like the look of!
We’ll be sure to post again after the release notes are out to give more details on our favourite features. Until then, happy hunting!
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Update (20/12/14)
We told you things were moving quickly: this post has been live for less than 24 hours and we already have more news to share!
Kristie Garafola, Salesforce’s Community Enablement Director, has now updated the IdeaExchange with details of which community suggestions are going GA or into pilot/beta as part of Spring ’15. And we now know that over 130 ideas and over 330,000 points are getting some love – making Spring ’15 the biggest ideas release ever. Wow!
So to help you find additional treasures buried in the pre-release, here are links to those IdeaExchange updates:
- Firstly, ideas going GA – including: reports in Salesforce1; Salesforce1 app for Windows mobile; DKIM; multiple email addresses for a contact; using LastActivityDate or LastModifiedDate in workflows; modifying multi-select picklists via workflow; recurring workflows; increased workflow rules limit; no downtime during upgrades; workflows to trigger other workflows; changes in formula fields to trigger workflows; relate tasks to multiple accounts/cases etc (including via Outlook).
- Secondly, ideas going into pilot/beta – including: relating a contact to multiple accounts; ability to reparent notes and attachments; improved lead conversion in Salesforce1.
Impressive stuff. Now we’re looking forward to the release notes even more!