Summer can’t come soon enough!

Well, it’s the last day of the UK school holidays before the Summer term starts, and to be honest Summer can’t come soon enough. And childcare is not the only reason I am saying this. Because it’s time to be incredibly sneaky and fire up my old Spring ’18 org… except it’s not Spring anymore, it’s been silently updated and is now running on Summer ’18, giving me a chance to get an early peek at the release! So without further ado, what could be coming in this summer’s release (#safeharbor)?

So let’s start at the top, literally – I spy with my little eye, a new little search dropdown at the top:

You can now hit the dropdown and have what looks like your recent items pop up for you in the blink of an eye – something like this:

If this was your iPhone you would probably think it’s Siri powering this feature, so is this our little friend Einstein sorting stuff out for us?

This sets me up for the next part – changes in the Setup menu. I personally wasn’t struggling to find stuff here, but I do know that finding everything which needs to be set up for Service Cloud implementations when you don’t know where to look can be pretty stressful – so say a quick hello to Service Setup Home:

If anything this should make getting Service Cloud going far quicker…

Staying in Setup, I’m pretty sure there has been some shuffling around and re-grouping of items for the better, however after some shuffling of my own, I was very surprised when this card turned up…. So why not ‘Zoom’ in and take a look at this..! 

So where do we head next? Well let’s take a look at something which introduces a (slight) shortcut for all those times you want to edit a page layout from Lightning. OK, so Edit Layout isn’t quite in the App Builder UI yet, but the ability to add/remove/reposition fields on a object layout is now one less click away, which is very handy.

Something which is in the App Builder UI now though, although you may need to squint to find it – the ‘Enable Inline Edit’ option when you display list views on Lightning Pages. Yeah it’s not quite support of inline editing of related lists (surely they have missed that?) but, still, useful nonetheless.

That’s enough of that, let’s head off down another path to the Contact object; yes another release brings another standard object which gets Path. I have to admit I forgot about Contact and the lack of Path, but now we have it, giving us many possibilities for visualising a contact journey – and that might be particularly useful in the world of B2C customer journeys.

I don’t want to spoil all the surprises for you, as we always recommend you go and do your own digging around in the pre-release org, to find what’s important for you. And if you don’t have an existing pre-release org to dive in right now, we are expecting the sign-up form for new pre-release orgs to go live next week, on Thursday April 19th.

But for now I will just leave you with something very simple: Lightning Report Builder is now GA and out of beta by the looks of things – so I am safely going to assume if you are one of the growing number of Lightning-only orgs, then you now have one less reason to care about Classic…

Alright, we’ll leave it there for now. But keep your eyes on the Release Readiness group on the Trailblazer Community, where the official Summer treasure hunt will be going live soon! Oh and stay tuned for the release notes, coming soon too. Do let us know if you find any treasure of your own now and then. Happy treasure hunting!