Salesforce has made hundreds of tweaks and advancements to the platform over the past year. We've taken a moment to reflect back on some of our favorites.
“I'm a fan of the duplicate management features that came along in 2015. Having duplicate identification and duplicate blockers alerts is invaluable when working with sales teams. Additionally, being able to customize dupe logic and have dupes identified across objects as an inherent feature gave premium apps like dupeblocker a run for their money.
Another plus is that it works with Salesforce1 too! It is powered by data.com. But you dont need a data.com license to use it. You can access this feature by going into the setup menu and searching for, ‘duplicate management.’ Salesforce's duplicate management feature is an excellent way for a company to get an introduction to the power and efficiency clean data can bring to their business with a free app native to Salesforce. Customers can then opt for a more powerful premium tool such as Ringlead or the aforementioned Dupeblocker which have more advanced features like cleaning existing data, as Salesforce’s duplicate management feature only works when creating new records.” -Rachel Zelkina, Cloud Consultant (Link: http://sforce.co/1NGHvXE)
“A good add in 2015 was the ability to run a single method or a subset of test methods when testing coverage as opposed to running all tests within a class. I'm often building out coverage for a single scenario, which is written, set-up, and configured in one test method and being able to run that single method saves a ton of time." -Kirk Steffke, Appexchange Practice (Link: http://sforce.co/1NGHvXE)
“Although, Company Communities aka Employee Communities was a Winter 14’ release, it was not really an advertised feature until this year. I like the employee community because it is a good option to add limited-use employees to enterprise orgs without incurring high licensing fees. Employee community access to standard objects is going to be expanded in Spring 16’- this is huge for our clients.” -Ami Assayag, Founder & Architect (Link: http://sforce.co/1RBgLhj)
“I have a couple favorite Salesforce advancements from the past year. I like Trailhead because it has really helped me to understand a number of Salesforce features. My second favorite advancement is Lightning Experience. I like Lightning Experience because I've seen the shift and dedication to supporting visualforce with minimal or no changes. This indicates that both are here to stay.” -Mike Katulka, Technical Lead (Link: http://sforce.co/1PjHAoF)
“I like the ability to run a single test method from a test class. My customer has large test classes that take a long time to run. It is much faster to just run the individual test method that I’m troubleshooting. I also like the Trailhead site. It’s very organized and provides great hands-on exercises that really make the information ‘click.’” -Mike Cerullo, Advanced Developer (Link: http://sforce.co/1RBjQxY)
“A platform advancement that I find interesting is ‘Choose Test Options for Change Sets.’ Prior to this feature, no tests were run when deploying from one sandbox to another. The result was that pushing to a staging or UAT (User Accepted Testing) sandbox was not particularly insightful in that regard. Now we can run any combo of tests during that deploy, or select local vs. managed package, etc., giving us a much better appraisal of our deployment. That this applies to production deployments as well is a game changer.” -Yad Jayanth, Lead Developer (Link: http://sforce.co/1U0rUpJ)
"Picking a single favorite feature from the past year or so is a tough one! I’m looking forward to ‘apex:map’ and ‘custom metadata types,’ as I haven’t had a chance to use them yet (only read about them). For a more practical use case, I love that data loader finally has a Mac version! Workbench works wonders for most of my data work, but it occasionally fails because a file is too big. This is a problem when setting up a dev org with some test data sets. And of course lightning components went GA! That’s huge, because lightning is the future of the platform and lightning components bring us the power to customize it to our needs." -Richard Tuttle, Solution Architect (Link: http://sforce.co/1ZlZCtu)
"My favorite feature from the past year has to be, 'Retain Field History with Field Audit Trail' - because it allows you to create a policy that can archive field history data for up to 10 years, independent of field history tracking. It’s exciting because it helps heavily regulated industries like finance and healthcare comply AND leverage the salesforce platform." -Ruud Erie, Salesforce Developer (Link: http://sforce.co/1TfgDSn)
Your turn! Do you have a favorite Salesforce feature from 2015? What is it? And why?
