It’s the year end time and Salesforce announce its next release Spring 17. With every release Salesforce announce some new feature and some improved version of existing functionality.
Here I am sharing some new feature which will be useful for Developer and Admin
- Kanban View Everywhere
Display records visually by switching to the Kanban view on (almost) any list view. Simply select Kanban from the menu. The Kanban view isn’t available on a few objects, such as knowledge and tasks. Also you can configure any Kanban view on the fly, selecting the fields on which to create columns and summaries.
- Sales Cloud Einstein: A Smarter Sales Process at Every Step Powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI)
AI for sales is here. With Sales Cloud Einstein, your team’s sales productivity is supercharged with key predictions, intelligent recommendations, and timely automation. This feature is new in Lightning Experience.
- Automated Activity Capture, Einstein users can connect their email and calendar to Salesforce. Then, their emails and events are automatically added to related Salesforce records and used by Einstein to generate insights. This feature is new in Lightning Experience.
- Use artificial intelligence to score your leads by how well they fit your company’s successful conversion patterns. Let your sales team prioritize leads by lead score. See which fields influence each lead score most. This feature is new in both Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic.
- Now you can get your sales reps’ contacts into Gmail™ easily. In addition, reps can see their Google Calendar™ meeting attendees directly from Salesforce. This change applies to both Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic.
Note: This release contains a beta version of Lightning Sync for Google, which means it’s a high-quality feature with known limitations. Lightning Sync for Google isn’t generally available unless or until Salesforce announces its general availability in documentation or in press releases or public statements.
- Use the <apex:slds> element to incorporate the Lightning Design System in your Visualforce pages and align them with the styling of Lightning Experience. This component is a streamlined alternative to uploading the Lightning Design System as a static resource and using it in your Visualforce pages.
- Use the $Asset global variable to access images, sprites, and other assets that are part of the Lightning Design System. Use it in Visualforce pages that also use the <apex:slds> component
[code language=”java”]
<apex:page>
<apex:slds />
<span class="slds-icon_container slds-icon–small slds-icon-standard-account"
title="Contact Avatar">
<img src="{!URLFOR($Asset.SLDS, ‘assets/images/avatar1.jpg’)}" alt="Contact Avatar" />
</span>
</apex:page>
[/code]
- Get more information about the status of Apex batch jobs. For a particular batch class, you can get information about parent jobs, such as submitted and completion dates and the number of batches processed or failed. This change applies to both Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic.
- Apex now allows web service callouts from chained queueable jobs. Previously, a queueable job could make a web service callout, but additional chained jobs that made callouts would throw exceptions.
- The SObject.getPopulatedFieldsAsMap() method returns a map of populated field names and their corresponding values. The map contains only the fields that have been populated in memory for the SObject instance. Previously, the method didn’t return fields that were added to an SObject after it had been retrieved via a SOQL query. This bug has been fixed, and the method returns the correct fields.
- Metadata relationship fields for custom metadata types now let you look up field definitions. Previously, you could look up entity definitions for standard and custom Salesforce objects, but not a specific field on an object. Now, field definitions are supported as a type of metadata relationship field. You can also create anddeploy long text areas as a custom field type.
- Each License Management Org can use one free ISV Customer Debugger session at a time. The ISV Customer Debugger is part of the Apex Debugger, which is part of the Force.com IDE plug-in for Eclipse and is normally a paid feature. The Apex Debugger can be used only in sandbox orgs, so you can initiate debugging sessions only from a customer’s sandbox.
- With the new Visualforce Page component, now you can add Visualforce pages to your Customer Service (Napili)-based community.
For example, say that you have the Salesforce CPQ (Steelbrick) app installed in your org. You can create a Quote detail page and use the Visualforce Page component to display the Quote line editor or other pages.
In Community Builder, add the Visualforce Page component to your page. Then edit the component to select the Visualforce page to use. If you installed the Salesforce CPQ (Steelbrick) app, those pages are available for selection here.
- Add the ltng:allowGuestAccess interface to your Lightning app to make it available to users without requiring that they register with or log in to your community. This interface makes your Lightning app available to more people, with fewer barriers to using it.
15: There are many new and improved Lightning components as well.for eg: lightning:button, lightning:buttonMenu, lightning:container etc.
You can also signup for a Pre-Release org here and check the release in more details and can play with new changes:
https://www.salesforce.com/form/signup/prerelease-spring17.jsp
As I am still reading the Release Notes and they are in Preview status so if I find something more useful I will add that in the list also if you want to add something let me know in comments. 🙂 Happy Holidays.