It’s that time of year again with Salesforce releasing their Summer 16 release notes describing all the changes in the Summer 16 release. Salesforce periodically publishes new documentation or makes significant updates to existing documentation. To receive these notices from Salesforce, follow @salesforcedocs on Twitter.
Here’s my review of the release notes. Let me know what you think of the release in the comments.
Unlimited Apps and Tabs
In professional, Enterprise and Unlimited editions, Salesforce now allows an unlimited number of apps and tabs. An app in this context is a collection of tabs. It’s not an app from the AppExchange and it’s not a connected app.
The unlimited tabs is especially useful because in the past, some clients had to purchase additional Force.com One App licenses so they could get up to an additional 90 tabs. This usually took a while to provision and delayed development a bit.
Associate A Contact With Multiple Accounts
“Contacts to Multiple Accounts lets your sales reps easily manage the relationships between people and businesses without creating duplicate records. This feature is available in Lightning Experience,
Salesforce Classic, and all versions of the Salesforce1 mobile app.”
This is a really nice enhancement and a welcome addition to the Salescloud. Now, one contact can be tied to multiple accounts reducing the duplication of records. It also allows one to describe an individual’s relationships with a company over time. For example, it could show that Luke worked at Company A as a Software Engineer from Year 1 – Year 3 and then have another record to Company A showing that Luke is now a Senior Technical Consultant from Year 4 – 5. Similarly, it could show that Luke worked at Company A from Year 1-3 and then at Company B from Year 4 – 7.
Lightning Changes
If you’ve been living under a rock, Lightning is Salesforce’s new responsive UI. It’s been around for a few releases now and its adoption has been fairly slow because it doesn’t have all the features that “Salesforce Classic” has. Below are new lightning features that will change that.
Home: Customize Home for Different User Profiles
An admin can now change home pages for different users based on their profiles.
“Display and organize useful components, and assign different pages to different types of users. You can even create and edit pages for leads, contacts, and other types of records! This feature is available in Lightning Experience only.”
Lightning Filter List Views Now Supported
One can now create filters on their Lightning list views. List views are one of my favorite Salesforce features. It lets a user define different views into viewing their data. For example, show me the top closed opportunities or highest probability opportunities.
“Lightning Experience filtering capabilities are now on par with the sleek efficiency of the user interface. With the addition of filter logic, your reps can pinpoint the data they need while enjoying an intuitive user experience. Reps can see available filters without editing alist view, and edit filters on the fly. This feature is available in both Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic.
Filter logic in Lightning Experience works just like in Salesforce Classic. Add filter logic from the Filters panel.”
Email: Enhanced Email, Send Email Through External Accounts
“Enhanced Email promotes email to a standard object, so your users can view emails in a standard
interface. Users can now relate emails to their contact, lead, account, opportunity, case, campaign,
and person account records. Does your company primarily send email using Gmail or Office 365?
Enable Send through Gmail or Send through Office 365 and let users opt in by connecting their
own accounts. Enjoy!”
This lets a Salesforce user to send email from their personal Gmail or Outlook 365 account from Salesforce. Unfortunately, emails sent through workflows and triggers are still sent through Salesforce so that puts a big damper on system notifications with this feature.
Automatically Get Geocodes for Addresses (Generally Available)
Salesforce will now automatically determine an addresses geocode coordinates for the Billing and Shipping address on accounts, the Mailing Address on contacts and Address on leads. This allows one to find nearby companies and individuals and do other interesting functions like creating a map showing customer density in a given territory like the northeast.
This feature is not available for Person Accounts and is not supported on custom objects or other standard objects.
Process Builder: Processes Can Execute Actions on More Than One Criteria
“Now you can choose what happens after your process executes a specific action group. Should the process stop, or should it continue evaluating the next criteria in the process? It’s up to you! Best of all, executing multiple action groups in a single process makes it easy to manage all of your processes for a given object, like a Case, in one place.”
Deployment: Sandbox Cloning and More Included Sandboxes
One can now create a sandbox by cloning it from an existing sandbox instead of having to refresh it from production.
“To clone a sandbox, from Setup, enter Sandboxes in the Quick Find box, then select Sandboxes > New Sandbox. From the
Create From drop-down menu, select the name of the sandbox to clone.”
This allows iterative development to be easier by copying over “a previously set of chosen metadata and data”. One case it’s easier is perhaps feature A is developed in Sandbox 1 and is in code review or internal QA but feature B is dependent on that work. Now, Sandbox 2 can be cloned from Sandbox 1 and feature B work can begin.
I’m curious if Salesforce will charge extra for this feature and what the limitations are for cloning. Extra Full and Partial sandboxes are not cheap and managing the “data” has always been a challenge, especially with determining a subset of data to import into Developer sandboxes.
Other Changes
The development changes this release are “nice-to-haves” that aren’t wowing me. For example, debug logs are now easier to manage, Asynchronous limits have been combined into one, View Apex Test Results More Easily, and one can now Get a Map of Populated SObject Fields.
As a developer, I want to see more “modern” enhancements to Apex like lambdas like LINQ in C# and more metadata programming enhancements. Salesforce added the “Type” class where one can dynamically instantiate classes based on name but I want more type information so that I can do things like give me all classes that extend class A or implement interface B.
For the full list of changes, see the Summer 16 Release Notes.
Didn’t find the unlimited tabs and apps in the release note. Are you sure about this ?
Vanessen,
I’m sure based on what’s currently published. The unlimited tabs and apps is on page 38 under “Limits Increased for More Power” of the release notes PDF linked at the bottom of the article.