Seems like yesterday that Salesforce released Summer 17 and here we are with Winter 18’s pre-release and release notes. Below is my review of the release notes. For a complete list of everything, check out the Winter 18 Release Notes PDF.
Lightning Experience Gets a New Look and Feel
Based on your feedback, we improved information density, legibility, contrast, and even added a splash of color. That means less time scrolling and scanning and more time focused on what matters most. This change applies to Lightning Experience only.
- More information density and less white space, so you can see more of what you need without scrolling.
- Improved legibility (using font size and color) to draw attention to what’s most important.
- Better contrast between foreground and background, making it easier to scan and scroll while staying focused on what you need. We even added color and a background image inspired by our own Trailhead.
That’s a relief because when I implemented Salescloud for a customer, they commented about their being way too much white space so it’s great to see this change coming.
Navigate More Quickly with Keyboard Shortcuts
New keyboard shortcuts allow your users to be more efficient in both console and standard navigation Lightning apps. This change applies to Lightning Experience only. To view the available keyboard shortcuts, press:
• Windows: Ctrl+/
• macOS: Cmd+/
As someone who doesn’t like to leave the keyboard, thank you, especially with simply pressing “e” for editing and “Ctrl+S” for saving!
Set Up Person Accounts with Ease
Ready to start using person accounts? You picked a great time because we steamlined the enablement process. This change applies to both Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic.
An automated process checks whether or not your org meets the requirements for using Person Accounts. The requirements are:
• At least one record type for accounts.
• Users that have read permission on accounts have read permission on contacts.
• Organization-wide default sharing is set so that Contact is Controlled by Parent or Account and Contact is Private.
From Setup, enter Account Settings in the Quick Find box, and then select Allow Customer Support to enable Person Accounts. After we confirm that your org is ready for Person Accounts, we’ll send an email with additional information about logging a Support case.
Salesforce, I can’t thank you enough for this! I wish you had done this about 5 years ago! At my last employer, our package used Person Accounts heavily, and waiting for Salesforce to enable Person Accounts through a case would usually take 1-2 days. That was even after we streamlined the case body to have all the info they always required, especially the “YES, I am the admin and understand this can’t be turned off once enabled”.
In fact, Ted Husted and I did a “Person Accounts in Action” white paper describing Person Accounts in-depth and published it but have to find it.
Various List View Enhancements
- Sticky column widths – You can resize a list view’s column width and it remains that size when you return to it later. You can reset it to its original size too.
- Edit More Records at Once with Mass Inline Editing – You can now update up to 200 records without leaving a list view! Select multiple records, click edit next to the field you want to update, enter the new value and click apply. It’s essentially the same as it worked in Classic. Glad this is finally added because this will really increase a power user’s productivity.
Merge Person Accounts in Lightning Experience
Sales reps can now view duplicates on person accounts in Lightning Experience just as they can on business accounts, contacts, and leads. Users with permission can merge person accounts, too. This change applies to Lightning Experience only.
1. In Setup, make sure that a duplicate rule for person accounts is active.
2. Configure the Potential Duplicates component in Lightning App Builder. Your sales team sees this alert when they view a person account with a duplicate.
I so wish this was available sooner like so many other things. In the past, I had to resort to customizations and other means for this. I wish this was available in Classic too but this is a start!
Better Email Integrations
The Gmail and Outlook integrations are getting better with every release! Task management and two-way syncing are amazing and setting it up is all declarative.
Wave Analytics Renamed to Einstein Analytics
They renamed it and are now including Einstein Discovery. There’s a ton of functionality here and it’s on my to-do list to dig into.
Embed Flows in Lightning Community Pages
Very interesting! This will allow all kinds of new interactions in Communities. Am excited to see how this pans out.
Create Communities in Enterprise, Performance, and Unlimited Editions — Even Without Communities Licenses!
All Enterprise, Performance, and Unlimited orgs can now create up to 100 communities, even without purchasing a Communities license. To start creating your community, first enable Communities in your org. After you create a community, give access to internal users with Salesforce user licenses. Guest users without a license have limited access to your community. Purchase Community Cloud licenses for more access or page views, based on your business needs.
Interesting. I wonder if internal users can now have departmental communities within Salesforce?
Dynamic Lightning Pages
Now you can control when a component appears on a record page by adding filter conditions and logic to its properties. No need to add anything to your custom components. It’s all handled by the Lightning App Builder. For example, construct a filter that causes a rich text component on an opportunity page to display when the Amount is greater than $1 million.
Component visibility filters are supported for standard components, custom components, and components from AppExchange. If you don’t define a filter, the component displays on the Lightning record page as usual. When you define one or more filters and set the filter logic for a component, the component is hidden until the filter logic criteria are met.
Admins can now declaratively define criteria for when a Lightning component is visible on a page through Lightning App Builder. Very nice!
Take Lightning Page Customization to a Whole New Level with Custom Page Templates
Now you’re no longer limited to the standard templates available for Lightning record, app, and Home pages. Take your business needs in hand, and create a custom page template of your own that has the structure and components that you define. Add as many regions as you need, and even custom styling. This feature is available in Lightning Experience and all versions of the Salesforce1 mobile app. It all works by using Lightning components.
Every Lightning page includes a template component that defines the page’s regions and what components it includes. Now you can create a custom Lightning page template component and make it available as a custom page template in the Lightning App Builder’s new page wizard.
There are new interfaces and tags for the .cmp and .design files that help you define the template’s structure, regions, and included components. Each page type has a different interface that the template component must implement.
• lightning:appHomeTemplate
• lightning:homeTemplate
• lightning:recordHomeTemplate
This definitely helps with UI and UX consistency, especially for those building large, custom applications.
Launch a Flow from an Object-Specific Action (Beta)
Add flows to the action menu on your Lightning pages without hunting down the flow’s URL. When you create a flow action, you can pick from a list of available flows rather than enter the flow URL manually. This feature is available in Lightning Experience and all versions of the Salesforce1 mobile app.
Tip: If your flow needs the ID of the record that it’s operating on, don’t worry! Salesforce sends the record ID to the flow as long as you have a Text input variable called recordId.
Thank you thank you thank you! Now, typical workflows can be even more specific per object! I have a few use cases for a client that I can apply this to. I wish this was available in Classic though as with so many of the other new features.
Configure a Flow to Wait for a Platform Event to Occur
You can now subscribe to platform events in a flow Wait element. With platform events, a flow can wait for something to occur, inside or outside your Salesforce org. Previously, a flow could wait only for a relative or absolute date/time value. This feature is new in both Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic.
This opens up a lot of interesting possibilities since one can now use Flows in this Pub-Sub architecture. This is now on my backlog to experiment with. What use cases can you think of for using this?
Salesforce DX: The New Frontier for App Development (Generally Available!!!)
With a focus on source-driven development, Salesforce DX makes it easier for developers to build together and continuously deliver using the tools that make you most productive. Salesforce Developer Experience (Salesforce DX) will be generally available in mid-October 2017.
Salesforce DX is built on these core principles:
• Source code drives everything.
• Metadata and code are modular.
• Environments are easily created and disposable.
• Development is organized around team collaboration.
• Development is based on open standards and extensibility.
• Flexible packaging supports an agile distribution model.
• Processes and tools facilitate continuous integration and continuous delivery.
Salesforce DX shifts the source of truth from the org to the version control system. By managing your Salesforce code outside of the runtime environment, you can harness industry-standard tools and drive team collaboration during the development and deployment process.
Whether you’re an individual developer or working as part of a large team, Salesforce DX provides an integrated, end-to-end life cycle designed for high-performance agile development. And best of all, we built it to be open and flexible so that you can build together with the tools and practices you know and love.
Simply awesome. This has to be my favorite Winter 18 release feature, by far. Getting changes from one org to another has always been a challenge but this should makes things easier. Additional investigation is needed to see how this can be done with Admins as well.
Lightning Data Service is GA
Spectacular! This is good for standard CRUD operations but for more advanced interactions, APEX is still needed.
Various New Lightning Base Components
There are around 30 new Lightning Base components available. Here are a few that really look interesting:
- lightning:datatable – More easily display tabular data.
- lightning:dualListbox – The Classic multi-picklist UI comes to lightning. I wish this didn’t.
- lightning:flow – Represents a lightning flow in Lightning. Now you can embed flows into custom components and apps. Very nice!
- lightning:fileUpload – Enables mutiple file to be uploaded to a record. It also includes drag-and-drop and filtering by file types. I wish this existed a couple months ago when I created something similar.
- lightning:helptext (Beta) – An icon with a text popover. The popover is displayed when you hover or focus on the icon that’s attached to it.
Bulk API 2.0 Generally Available
Bulk API 2.0 uses the same secure, high-performance REST framework as the Force.com REST API, which provides features like OAuth authentication and CORS support. Bulk API 2.0 also provides a streamlined interface for data operations by breaking data files into batches automatically. Upload your data and specify an operation. Salesforce then determines the most efficient way to batch the data.
This is my second favorite new feature. The new API automatically breaks up data files into batches automatically. Thank you. I spent a decent amount of time in the Salesforce Bulk API Starter project getting that to work. Now updating that project to use the 2.0 API is on my backlog!
What features were noteworthy to you?