Although we have just started the new year and it is still WINTER, Spring has sprung for Salesforce and the Spring ‘19 release is live. Unsure of when your instance will be updated with a new release? Go to Salesforce Trust, click on Maintenances. If you know
your instance enter into the search window. All releases for your instance will be updated here. Salesforce Trust is also a great place to find out if there are any issues on your instance.
Don’t know what instance you are on? Login to your Org, go to setup/Company Information and your “Instance” will be listed under Organization Detail.
From Salesforce:
“Salesforce will turn on Lightning Experience on a rolling basis starting with the Winter ‘20 release* for all orgs with editions that support Lightning Experience.
* Currently targeted for October 2019; date subject to change.
All users with the Lightning Experience User permission enabled are affected by this update, which includes all users with standard profiles as well as users with custom profiles or permission sets that have the Lightning Experience User permission enabled by an admin.”
“The future of the Salesforce user experience and platform is Salesforce Lightning. Moving forward, all of our new innovations will be in Lightning Experience. We encourage everyone to transition to Lightning Experience before the Winter ‘20 release so they can benefit from everything the new interface has to offer.”
“NOTE: Users will still maintain control of their user experience after this change as they are still able to switch back to Salesforce Classic as needed.”
Now more than ever it is critical that you begin to migrate your Org to Lightning Experience. Salesforce has implemented a “Critical Update Console” (CRUC) to help you with this conversion. Does converting to Lightning seem daunting - CRM Science is a leader in assisting customers to convert to Lightning Experience. Don’t delay in contacting us to discuss your needs.
Now let’s talk about some of My Favorite Spring ‘19 “enhancements”.
Increased Data Storage - (did you say increased data storage! - this is one of my favorite and a long time coming, thank-you Salesforce) Minimum storage is increasing from 1GB to 10GB, and will be implemented late March 2019. For example:
Retention Limit for Field History - on the flip side, Salesforce with the Spring ‘19 release will begin removing Field History Data older than 24 months (originally announced in the Winter ‘19 release). Field History Data is retained in your org for 18 months and is then accessible for another 6 months through the API, for a total of 24 months. You can also purchase the FAT add-on which allows you to define a policy to retain archived field history data up to 10 years from the time the data was archived.
Pinned List Views - tired of seeing the “Recently Viewed” as the default list view, well now users will be able to pin a list as their default list.
Survey Enhancements - (Note: Unless you are using Financial Services Cloud or Health Cloud, you get one free survey. Additional surveys can be purchased for an additional cost.) A few of the new enhancements include: (1) Ability to translate into 10 languages, (2) two new question types that will help you assess loyalty and preference, (3) Generate survey invitations directly from Contacts or Person accounts.
Lightning Knowledge - Drum roll...Lightning Migration Tool is now GA (Generally Available). This migration tool will do the brunt of the work for you by consolidating article types, creating record types, and most importantly moving articles and files. It will also migrate articles owned by inactive users. A few caveats: Salesforce Support must activate, must be tested in a full-copy Sandbox, and Salesforce will verify results prior to enabling in production. You no longer need to switch to Classic to restore an archived or a past version article - this can now be done with the new action “Restore”. Two additional actions have also been added - “Edit as Draft” and “Archive”.
Console - New dropdown menu for Sub-tabs (close, refresh, customize, or promote it to a workspace tab) and two-region page templates (Console: Pinned Left Sidebar (2 regions), and Console: Pinned header and Left Sidebar (2 regions).
It’s the Little Things - sometimes it is the little things that get you excited. Here are a few of my “Little Things” coming in Spring ‘19.
Accept Case Button - One of the features only available in Classic is now available in Lightning, “Accept Case Button” available on list views and case record detail page
Close Tab after Macro - easily add a Final Close Tab instruction to let agents know the macro has completed
Reports - highlighting a few (1) Joined Reports up to five blocks, (2) Resize columns, eliminating white space, (3) Stacked Summaries in Matrix reports, (4) Conditional Formatting (this is in Beta)
Critical Update - hyperlink in formula fields will now work correctly and honor the target value
This is just a few of the features and enhancements available in the Spring ‘19 Release. What are your favorite Spring ‘19 Enhancements? For more information on Spring ‘19, the full Release Notes can be viewed here.
As always, we at CRM Science are always happy to help you solve your problems with Salesforce head over to our contact page to reach out!
Written by
Linda Johnson, Solution Architect
