As a Salesforce Admin, your job is a balancing act. You’ve got to maintain the health and efficiency of your company’s Salesforce org while also supporting the myriad of needs (and wishlists) from your colleagues. It’s with those challenges in mind that I pored over the release notes for Spring ‘18 and picked out five items that will make the life of all admins just a wee bit easier. Let’s dig in:
To kick things off, let’s start with one for you, my fellow admin: Report Builder Lightning Updates! Gone are the days of switching back and forth for what used to feel like basic reporting tools. You want buckets? This release has got ‘em! Cross filters? Summary Formulas? Those are coming too! Oh, and your users can now flag their favorite reports. These improvements remove a pretty gnarly roadblock to daily use of the new UI and make it all the more appealing to migrate (and stay in) Lightning Experience.
Reports aren’t the only tool getting some love. You can now subscribe to dashboards! You’ve probably already made custom home pages and embedded dashboards everywhere that your C-level users need to see them but with this release, you can schedule those dashboards to refresh and get emailed directly to the users. You know who’s gonna love this? The VP of Sales, on a Saturday morning, at 5 am, near the end of the fiscal year. You know who else? You, because you can keep sleeping on Saturday at 5 am.
Let’s throw out one for your end users: Personalized Navigation for Lightning Apps. Your users love to customize their tabs, but that hasn’t been possible so far in Lightning Experience. With the release of Spring ‘18, it’s super easy for users to throw their own customizations onto the navigation bar in any Lightning App. New temporary tabs will be opened automatically for objects that aren’t already part of app’s navigation, and users can make them permanent or add tabs for records, reports, or dashboards in just two clicks. That’s right, a dashboard called out as a dedicated tab. Users can also rearrange tabs and rename any of their custom additions, but don’t worry, these changes are user-specific and they don’t impact any tabs that you’ve set up by default in the App setup.
Who among you makes frequent use of campaigns? You’re gonna love this one. With the release of Spring ‘18, you’re gonna be able to add Campaign Members without leaving the Campaign detail page. With a single click on either the ‘Add Leads’ or ‘Add Contacts’ button, a new pop-up box will launch that lets you search for exactly the records you need to target. This is a Lightning-only feature, though, so more incentive to help get your marketing team over to the new Lightning Experience.
My final favorite improvement coming in Spring ‘18 is that Dynamic Components are no longer limited to Record pages in Lightning Experience. You can now make your Home and App pages fully dynamic based on criteria you set as the Admin. From custom message pop-ups for certain user groups to dashboard components only being embedded for the appropriate team members, the future is…dynamic. But that’s not all! Record page component filtering has been improved to allow for Related object criteria. The interface for setting criteria resembles Process Builder so it’s super easy to navigate.
Spring ‘18 has a bunch more cool features for everyone, check out the release notes today and leave a comment below with any questions. It’s not every day that release notes get the imagination going but this one has me dreaming up all kinds of cool stuff I can do in our org.
