I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream for the Summer ‘15 Release!
As we round the corner on a hot summer, Salesforce has whipped up some cool new updates in its latest release.
As with all Salesforce releases, some features in Summer ’15 affect all users immediately after the release goes live, while others require direct action by an administrator before users are affected. Check out this article that lists how and when features become available to see if and when these updates will be affecting your use.
Here are the highlights from our favorites in this summer’s release:
If you’ve ever posted to Chatter and realized you made a typo or you need to add something to the post (which is pretty much everyone), you now have the power to edit your Chatter posts and comments after publishing.
With the Allow users to edit posts and comments option in Chatter settings, users can edit their original text posts and comments. When the edited version is saved, a new timestamp will be created for the post. This update is also available on Chatter Desktop.
Summer ’15 also enables you to report on Chatter activity, add records to groups, and create cases from Chatter Questions.
Community managers can now merge, rename, and delete topics under one location, making it easier to manage and curate the burgeoning amount of topics as a community grows. Community managers can create actionable recommendations for new and existing users to drive engagement within in a community.
Communities can now be built in the Sandbox before they are released straight from the Sandbox. Previously, you could only publish such a community in production. Now you can use the Sandbox to test your changes before they go live.
External users with the “Create and Customize Reports,” “Report Builder,” and “Edit My Reports” permissions can now create and edit reports in their own personal folders or in a privately shared folder in Communities. You can grant partner and customer users permissions to create and edit reports through their profiles or by using permission sets.
And with the improved License Dashboard, included in the updated Salesforce Communities Dashboards package (soon to be released on the AppExchange), system admins can track licenses usage in real-time, filter reports by user detail, and report on record feeds.
Data Loader, the easy-to-use tool for importing, exporting, updating, and deleting Salesforce data previously only available for Windows, is now available for Mac OS X.
If your Salesforce edition allows the use of Force.com API (Enterprise, Unlimited, and Developer Editions), you can find and download the Data Loader from the Setup menu, under Administer > Data Management
All your files from your Salesforce content libraries, including private files, can be synced in Chatter. You can sync a Salesforce file from anywhere in Chatter (from the Files tab to the Chatter feed) directly to a folder in your Salesforce Files directory on your local drive. Here’s a screenshot of what syncing directly from the Feed will look like.
This is a super helpful new feature in the Summer ‘15 Release. With Files Connect, Salesforce users can now access and share content from Google Drive. Users can access Google Drive from the Salesforce desktop UI and the Salesforce1 mobile app.
To attach a Google Drive file to a post or comment in Chatter, go to Attach file > Select a file from Salesforce, and Google Drive will appear in the sidebar as a folder from which you can select a Google document. Keep in mind, this is NOT the same as “syncing” files -- changes to the original Google document must still be made in Google Drive, and they can’t be made via Chatter.
Lead Conversion on Salesforce1
With business increasingly done on the run on mobile devices, Salesforce has added additional features to the Salesforce1 app to boost your productivity. Sales representatives on the go can convert qualified leads to contacts, as well as create accounts and opportunities. One major key lies in lead conversion; you can now convert a lead and create an associated account and opportunity on the go with a single tap!
System Admins can now login as any user for testing or troubleshooting without having to ask the user to grant access or to enable the “Admin can login as any user” setting. This is great for speeding up the process of troubleshooting issues/errors and testing new functionality.
For users who like to jot down their thoughts in apps such as Evernote, Salesforce has introduced Notes, an enhanced version of the Salesforce note-taking tool. Notes can be related to a record or kept private and only visible to the author. It’s cross-platform, so users can access their notes from the desktop or mobile devices, and in Salesforce1, users can create tasks right from the note with a single swipe.
*Because it’s in Beta, this version of Notes is only available in Contact Manager, Group, Professional, Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited, and Developer Editions.
For a more detailed description of the new features, check out this release resources page, which includes something for everyone (think demos, developer resources, release notes, and list of quick wins).
