July 14, 2020

July 14, 2020 | Chris Job | Senior Application Support Analyst

Is your company taking full advantage of Salesforce’s seasonal releases? Or are you having to put off new features due to adoption challenges, low bandwidth, or a lack of Salesforce resources with the knowledge and time?

While keeping pace with these latest innovations can be challenging for businesses, the companies that do take advantage of these seasonal upgrades gain a significant competitive advantage. In the next five years, Salesforce releases will contain an increasing number of new features covering the entire Lightning Experience. Those innovations will help businesses drive down costs and create more value for their internal and external customers.

Even if your organization is not taking full advantage of Salesforce’s capabilities, it is safe to assume your competitors are. The Summer ’20 Release is arriving July 17-18 (check out Salesforce Summer 20 Release Calendar). In this post, we will highlight some of the new features and their potential to improve your processes.

Summer ‘20 Highlights

Every seasonal release contains innovations across Salesforce’s Customer 360 platform, although some features impact only specific products (like Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Einstein, etc.). There are also plenty of features that impact Salesforce overall like Navigation Consoles in Lighting Apps, the Salesforce Optimizer App, and Lightning Configuration Converter.

One thing all these innovations have in common is that they are all on the Lighting Platform, so if you’re using the Lightning Experience, there’s plenty of advantages there for you. If you’re still transitioning to Lightning, then each release still has features to move your organization one step closer to migrating from Classic (Salesforce’s not-so-secret imperative).

Here are some of the Summer ‘20 release features I know will offer high ROI when it comes to long-term value and level-of-effort to deploy.

In-App Guidance Builder

This Builder allows prompts and walkthroughs set on Salesforce apps for sharing information, training, and/or onboarding users. You can drive user adoption and promote organizational change management by giving users a hands-on interactive tour through business processes.

This feature expands the ability of your Salesforce Admin to drive adoption by customizing interactive application content for all of your business processes. Admins can run reports on metrics to help fine-tune where items like walkthroughs and prompts get displayed throughout an app.

You can make training more valuable and efficient by using In-App Guidance Builder and myTrailhead. You can customize the training experience even further by redirecting users that click the help link in Trailhead to custom URLs and Landing Pages specific to their training.

Report and Dashboard Updates

Reports and Dashboards are getting major enhancements, like the ability to create new report types on price book entries and a new option to attach a .csv file when new people subscribe to a report. A sub-tab feature for reports makes managing reports and individual records on the Lightning Console easier than ever.

The new prebuilt Flow Report captures detailed metrics about the flows your Salesforce technical resource designs. This report shows time spent on screen flows, which users are accessing screen flows, and the status of flow interviews.

Enhanced Folder Sharing will introduce new user permissions and changes to users’ access to existing reports and dashboards. This is a great opportunity to get organized and prepare for Legacy Folder Sharing’s retirement in Winter ’21. If you have a lot of reports, it’s never too soon to start planning ahead.

Split-View Navigation on Lists Views

If you’ve ever used Salesforce, then you’ve more than likely experienced opening up multiple tabs or windows when trying to review or update several records from a related list.

Starting with the new release, navigating related lists in the Split-View feature will allow users to view list views and record pages side by side. List views remain visible after clicking the new button, making it easier for users to add new records on the fly.

Dynamic Forms (Beta)

Finally, Dynamics Forms will provide the most relevant data to users by creating record pages in Lightning App Builder. Save time and increase data accuracy with Dynamic Forms by displaying only relevant section details on a record page.

How to Gain a Competitive Advantage

Whether you’re experiencing Salesforce for the first time or have had the CRM for 20 years, it’s important to evaluate how prepared your business is to properly implement new technologies on the platform. Spinnaker Support’s team of certified Salesforce professionals have the skills and experience to help your organization manage Salesforce’s new releases and maximize the value of your Salesforce experience.

Spinnaker Support’s Salesforce Managed Services packages can help you to deploy the latest Salesforce Innovations and ensure your organization’s long-term CRM success. Salesforce is doing its part to improve the quality and capabilities of its products. Let us help your organization to take full – and fast – advantage of those new features. Reach out and contact us today for an introductory conversation.