How the Winter '16 Release Will Affect You
A couple of weeks ago, Salesforce admins, users, and developers from around the world gathered around their respective hot cocoas and settled in for a demo of the Winter ‘16 release. There are three Salesforce releases a year, meant to keep users up to date on all the latest new features. Even with regular updates, there is a lot of info to process (400 pages of notes from this release), so there’s also the option of watching the Winter ‘16 demo or the Salesforce Foundation’s Highlights of Winter '16 Release webinar.
Some features debuted in the release affect all users immediately, while other features require installation or ‘turning on’ by an administrator before users would experience the change.
The Lightning Experience
The beginning stages of rolling out the Lightning Experience is one of the most exciting aspects of this release, but there’s a lot of mystery surrounding what it will mean for the end user, and it’s still up to the admin whether these features are turned on or not. A few members of our team gave us some insight on the Lightning Experience features they’re looking forward to seeing in action.
Carolyn Fischer: IC Senior Consultant
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I like the new way to access Standard and Custom Objects through the Object Manager. This way, all objects are in one place, within the same tree.
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There’s also new quick search functionality in the Object Manager
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Great improvements to the Dashboards. You can now re-size charts if you need more space to see the data.
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Notes Enhancements. Users can create rich text notes and the notes are saved automatically. You can also relate a note to multiple records.
April Harris: IC Consultant
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Locked Filters in Reports means users get access to useful report templates but can’t edit key filter that define the report for all users (ie - you don’t have to worry about messing anything up).
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Updated List Views with embedded dynamic charts. Plus, views can now convert to ‘boards,’ with drag and drop capability. This will be a great tool for Opportunity Management!
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With Sales Path, users will see relevant tips and fields at each opportunity stage. It’s embedded coaching to help bring opportunities to a successful close.
*In the spirit of due diligence, while we were researching this post, IC Developer David Cheng alerted us to an informative post on the Hub listing the things that don’t work in Lightning. Major issues include the ability to export reports and the fact that the Recycle Bin is not accessible. Make sure you chat with your consultant about updates, new features, and the changes you’ll be seeing.
As with every Salesforce release, there are also many additional features that admins can implement and users can adopt even if your organization is not using the Lighting Experience User Interface. Improvements to Chatter, Communities, Mobile, and many more can be found in this full guide to the release notes. A great resource for nonprofit admins to get up to speed is The Success Thread for Release Readiness & Feature Adoption on the Hub.
Do you have any questions regarding updates for your Salesforce instance, or wonder how new changes might affect your database?
