Have you noticed the sunglasses-wearing seagulls in your Salesforce org? Seagulls to me usually represent a nuisance at the beach, but in this case they signify that Salesforce’s Summer ’17 Release is here. In case you haven’t found the time for the light reading of 578 pages of release notes, I want to highlight a few of the things I think are most exciting for nonprofits and higher education institutions. Some of the features are available only in Lightning and some are available in both Classic and Lightning. Details about each item are below.
Add Members to Campaigns in Reports
Up until now you could add members to campaigns with the click of a button only on standard reports. Now you can add up to 50,000 contacts or leads to a campaign with the click of a button from standard and custom reports. This applies to Salesforce Classic and Lightning Experience. Please note you must include the Full Name field in your report to be able to do this. So go forth, create some awesome reports to get the list you need and click that button to add them to the campaign of your choice.
Duplicate Detection Across Objects
Using Salesforce’s native de-duplication tool you can now detect duplicates across Leads and Contacts using standard duplicate rules. So if you have folks who have a tendency to enter Leads or Contacts without searching first, this will flag potential duplicates as they are being created. This applies to Lightning Experience and Classic.
Lightning for Gmail
If your organization uses gmail you’re going to want to take a look at this feature which is now generally available in both Lightning Experience and Classic. With it you can relate emails you create in gmail to records in Salesforce, use Lightning email templates to send emails through gmail to save time composing commonly used emails, and choose which gmail attachments to include in Salesforce. You can also keep Salesforce events up to date from your google calendar. Another cool feature is you can identify which emails in gmail that you related to Salesforce. This is a great productivity booster and helps your users get more invested in Salesforce.
Lightning for Outlook
Don’t let the name on this one confuse you, this tool can be used in both Lightning Experience and Classic. If you are using the older Salesforce for Outlook you should look at upgrading to this tool which has even more features and functionality. This tool isn’t new as of this release but has some improved functionality with a two-way calendar sync with Microsoft Exchange, you can relate your emails to Salesforce before you send them through Outlook, and use Lightning email templates for crafting those emails.
Convert Attachments to Files
In case you hadn’t heard, Salesforce Attachments are going away. Salesforce Files are much more versatile and powerful. So you should instruct your users to stop adding documents to the Attachments object and switch to the Files object. But you likely have many documents living in Attachments – what to do? Salesforce Labs has created an app that allows you to convert Attachments to Files. Once you’ve converted all Attachments you should remove that related object from all related lists so users only have access to Files going forward. Make sure you delete the Attachments once you’ve run the conversion so you free up storage.
Spell Correction in Search
Don’t you hate it when you put in search terms for something you know is in your Salesforce org and the results return nothing? Then you realize later it was because you misspelled a word. Well now if you have Lightning Experience Salesforce will automatically apply spelling correction and let you know it has also searched for the spelling corrected word, much in the same way Google does. So for the spelling –challenged, your life just got a little bit better.
Lightning Migration Assistant Improvements
When you go to Setup you’ll now see the a new and improved Lightning Migration Assistant at the top of the page. Just click Get Started and the new wizard-style interface will guide you through assessing your org’s readiness and the steps to take when you’re ready to convert. The new Migration Assistant also offers expanded analysis so even if you have run it in the past, you might want to run it again for additional information. If you find the process of evaluating Lightning intimidating, Cloud for Good offers Lightning readiness assessments which we can follow with a proposal to guide you through the process and train your users at the end. Lightning is the future of Salesforce and we recommend all organizations start to plan for converting your org to Lightning.
This blog post lists just a few of the many great enhancements and features available in the new release. On Thursday, June 29 at 2:00 pm EDT, Cloud for Good will be hosting a Customer for Life Webinar highlighting features of the Summer ’17 Release. If you are a current or past customer, please register for this upcoming webinar. You will also want to check out the full release notes to see all the other great goodies available.
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