The Salesforce Spring ‘20 Release Features We’re Excited About

Even as we write this, many of our consultants around the U.S. are reporting snow, but over at Salesforce, it’s spring again.

The Salesforce Spring ‘20 release is live! Your Salesforce org should have been updated over the weekend and you probably now see Blaze — the customer success Cloud Services wolf mascot — frolicking with a hummingbird when you log in. So what’s good with the Spring ‘20 release? We asked some of our Salesforce experts here at Idealist Consulting to tell us which new features they’re most excited about.

Picks from Grant, Data Migration Expert

1. Clone Opportunities or Campaigns Along with Their Related Records — Spring ‘20 introduces a new feature that allows users to clone an opportunity with its standard related records, like contact roles, products, etc. When this might be helpful? For example, a nonprofit org might have an opportunity representing a major gift with a team of contact roles related to it. If you wanted to clone that opportunity and the entire team of contact roles and start working on a new project quickly, now you can.
2. Automate Processes for Opportunity Contact Role — Salesforce has been doing a lot of work on the Opportunity Contact Role object to make it a first class object. Now you can use Process Builder to automate functions related to the Opportunity Contact Role, which is a huge win for admins.
3. Empty the Recycle Bin in One Step — The recycle bin found its way to Lightning in the Winter ‘20 release, and now you can actually empty it from Lightning too.
4. Attach Formatted Spreadsheets to Report Subscriptions (Beta) — Grant says he’s had clients in the past ask for this feature. You can schedule a report for a user, and in the past, the user would just get an email on the scheduled date directing them to look at the report. With Spring ‘20, you can now have Salesforce send the email with the report formatted as a CSV attached.
5. Activities: Assign Tasks to a Queue to Share Work Efficiently — This new feature allows admins to assign a task to a queue instead of to a particular person. Easy!

Picks from David, Solution Architect

1. Create Navigate to a Record’s Create Page with Default Field Values — This was a Classic URL hack. Get it? With Salesforce Classic, you could have a custom button that connected to a standard page layout for creating a new record and pre-populate fields on that layout. This previously wasn’t possible in Lightning, but finally in Spring ‘20 Salesforce has given an option to pre-populate fields with a URL using standard page layouts.
2. Let Guest Users Schedule Inbound Appointments — With this new feature, you can send a link to a non-licensed person and they can schedule themselves into the user’s Salesforce calendar.
3. Use More API Calls — Just like when Salesforce boosted the data storage to 10gb last year, Salesforce is now upping the API call limit. With Spring ‘20, the API call limit increased from 15,000 to 100,000 calls daily. This is a pretty big deal especially for people who have a lot of external applications connected to Salesforce.
4. Run Flows Without Worrying About User Permissions with System Mode -— Before the Spring ‘20 Release, Flows defaulted to the user’s context. That means if a user had very limited permissions the flow could fail, especially if you wanted them to do things like delete objects that they didn’t have permission to. Now, Flows can run in system mode with access to the whole system if needed.
5. Update New and Changed Records 10 Times Faster by Using Before-Save Updates in Flow — Flows can now operate before a save, like a developer can set an Apex trigger to fire before update or insert. What does this mean? Say you change information to a Salesforce record and click save. With declarative automation, the data is committed to the database first. But your changes could cause declarative automations like Process Builder or Workflow to run, prompting changes to more fields, which means more data has to be saved. It’s not efficient from a systems standpoint. On the other hand, in that second after a save, Salesforce can look for appropriate Apex automations, and depending on how the trigger is written, a developer can decide whether the automation trigger they wrote should fire before the new data you entered is committed to the database, or whether Salesforce should commit the new data to the database, then go back and run the automation coded in the trigger. Basically, there’s a lot more nuance a developer can play with when writing Apex, and Salesforce is bringing some of that to declarative functions like Flow.

Picks from Rochelle, Experience Cloud Expert

1. Count Unique Values in Report Results — You used to have to use a Power of One field to count unique records when building a report. Now, there’s native functionality right within Report Builder for that.
2. Create a Filtered List of Records Using Time-Related Conditions (Beta) — With this feature, you no longer have to build a report to find and edit lists like all the cases closed this year. This helps your users edit records quickly right from within their workflow.
3. Secure Your Sandbox Data with Salesforce Data Mask — When building a partial or full copy Sandbox, you can now hide or mask data for security. This is helpful for securing data and preventing accidental automation, like sending email, from a Sandbox. You enable this feature through a managed package installed in your production org that then masks data when Sandboxes are created or refreshed.
4. Reports and Report Builder in Experience Cloud — Reports and the Report Builder is now directly available within Lightning Experience Cloud to users with Experience Cloud licenses.
5. Update and Deploy Lightning Communities with Experience Bundle — This is a power feature for developers who work with Salesforce Experience Cloud. It used to be really hard to find all the pieces that are part of a Experience Cloud. This new feature takes all the files related to Experience Cloud and bundles them together in a sort of folder with subfolders.
6. Deploy Customizations Sooner After Uploading a Change Set — Change sets deploy faster now and everyone will be happier. How fast? We’ll all soon find out!
7. Configure Get Records Elements Without Selecting Fields — If you set a Get Records element in a Flow, you can now just automatically store all fields related to that record. You don’t have to manually set variables; you don’t have to choose which fields to store. You can now set the Flow to pull in all fields in your Get Records element, and you’ll never have to worry that you’ve remembered to get everything you need.

Have a favorite new feature we didn’t mention here? Let us know on Twitter. And if you’re looking for more Salesforce tips, tricks, and news, sign up for our monthly newsletter.

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