Thursday was Product Keynote day at Dreamforce ‘15 and the Cloud for Good team spread out to cover them all. The Cloud for Good team left each keynote excited and inspired by all the new announcements. Here’s a rundown of our highlights:
Service Cloud
The most exciting thing we heard was that the new Lightning Service Console leverages the Lightning Experience and the highlights panel can be customized with Lightning Components thus bringing more flexibility and a new look to the Service Console.
Other notable announcements included embedded analytics on case detail pages that expose case trends by geography and type; the ability to identify secondary issues on the case or make recommendations; the ability to use macros to chain tasks, assignments and case to-dos.
Nonprofit Products Roadmap
Version 3 of the Nonprofit Starter Pack gave users some fantastic new features like better grant and deadline management, allocations and email notifications. These new additions came from community requests and input. The team behind the NPSP is committed to continuing that involvement by creating an IdeaExchange on the Power of Us Hub specifically for ideas for the NPSP. Making the NPSP compatible with Lightning Experience is high priority.
To get involved with creating new features or documentation for the NPSP, consider joining the NPSP Community Sprint on October 22-23 in Seattle.
SalesforceIQ for Sales Cloud
SalesforceIQ is an exciting new tool that allows users to connect their email inbox to Salesforce data. It’s currently supported on iOS, Android and Chrome and allow users to see information on prospects and contacts without leaving their inbox.
SalesforceIQ brings intelligence by automatically creating reminders and tasks related to those contacts based on email content. It links with your calendar and send reminders with times to book meetings. This feature takes away much of the pain of scheduling meetings because it allows contacts to pick a meeting time from available times and automatically booking it on your calendar.
Developer Keynote
The most amazing success story of 2015 was the launch and rapid adoption of Trailhead, a free, interactive platform for learning Salesforce. As of today, over 165,000 Trailhead badges have been earned. Trailhead modules are available for admins, developers, end users and now NPSP users have their own trail. Look for a Cloud for Good blog post on this new trail soon!
Much focus was given to creating modern apps and providing tools for admins and developers to build, test and deploy secure, robust apps. The demo of the Lightning Design System wowed us by showing us how easy it can be to build apps that follow branding and design using CSS styles.
Salesforce Shield brings encryption, improved field auditing (up to 10 years worth of field history!) and event monitoring to the platform in a finer grained level that has ever been possible.
The developer team also introduce Heroku Private Spaces that promise to solve the dilemma of private versus public cloud by merging the breadth and scale of the public cloud with the security and trust of the private cloud.
Community Cloud
Starting in Winter ‘16, the Community Cloud will have some great new features for both community users and managers. Community managers will have some new moderation tools to block posts, mask specific words or flag posts for moderation. Users will have a more personalized experience with recommendations and auto-complete on searches.
Day 3 ended with a rockin’ concert at Pier 70 featuring Gary Clark Jr., The Killers and Foo Fighters. It’ll be hard to top the excitement of Day 3, but we’re looking forward to the inspirational sessions being presented on Day 4.
