Top 10 Lightning Experience Gems of Salesforce Spring’18 Release!

Last Updated on April 15, 2019 by Rakesh Gupta

Lighting Experience is one of the best user interfaces designed by Salesforce. It is faster, quicker and easier to maintain. If you are still using Salesforce Classic user interface, Spring’18 release will give you hundreds of reasons to switch to Lighting Experience. Some of the key features, that are now available in Lightning, include – Personalized Navigation, Boost Productivity with Quick Text and Macros, Faster Flow for Adding Campaign Members, Track Campaigns with Path, Opportunity Split, Price Book Selection, Zero Quantity Order Lines Allowed on Order Products, Chat Faster with Quick Text in Lightning Experience, Upload Files Directly from a Flow, etc. 

Currently, Spring’18 release is available under the pre-release program. On the 5th and 6th of January, Sandboxes will be upgraded; as a result, your organization will get the look and feel of Spring’18 release. 

If you have not read the entire 437 pages of Salesforce Spring’18 release notes, check out Spring’18 release quick summary written by me. 

I combed through the release notes and highlighted the most exciting, interesting, and useful Lightning Experience features. Believe me, it was hard to stop at just ten! To kick things off, here is my take on the coolest Lightning features from Spring’18 release. 

1) Create Pinned Region Pages for Your Console Apps:- A pinned region remains displayed as you navigate to subtabs in a Lightning console app. Three new page templates are available for Lightning console apps to make it easier for console users to work with records. 

2) Upload Files Directly from a Flow:- You can upload files from a flow by adding the forceContent:fileUpload Lightning component to a flow screen.This change applies to Lightning Experience and Salesforce mobile web. However, it only works for the Lightning flow runtime.

3) Organize Lightning Page into Collapsible Sections: – Manage screen clutter by grouping components into collapsible sections. The new Accordion component is like the Tabs component, but vertically stacked. You can use the Accordion component on all record pages. This feature is new in Lightning Experience.

You can have up to 25 sections, but we recommend no more than 10. You can also embed multiple components in each section, each with its own heading.

4) Make Your Lightning App and Home Pages Dynamic: – Setting visibility conditions for components isn’t limited to record pages anymore. Now you can set visibility rules on the Lightning app and Home pages too.

App and Home pages are not associated with an object, so the filters you can use are limited to other contexts, such as User or Client. But that does not mean that they are less powerful. For instance, with a filter using you can display one component to users those belongs to India, etc. 

5) Include Related Fields and Other Objects in Component Visibility Rules: – Before Spring’18 release, you could only define component visibility rules on Lightning record pages based on the fields directly on the record. Now you can create filters that are much more robust.

For example, on record pages, you can select fields from the record by clicking Record Field. Or click Advanced to expand your field selections to related fields, related objects, or fields from other objects such as Client and User.

6) Add Knowledge to Your App with the Knowledge Setup Flow:- The Lightning Knowledge Service Setup flow now adds Knowledge to the item menu in the Service Console app. If you have already enabled Lightning Knowledge, you can add Knowledge to the item menu using the App Manager in Setup. 

7) Increase Your Efficiency with Quick Text: – Why type the same message multiple times when you can insert predefined messages, like greetings, notes, and answers to common questions. You can use quick text on all standard and custom objects in the following supported quick actions: Email, Log a Call, Social, and Live Agent chats. Previously, Quick Text was available only in Salesforce Classic. Quick Text is enabled by default in Lightning Experience.

8) Mass Quick Actions in Lightning Experience: – You can now perform mass quick actions on up to 200 items in a list view for Cases, Leads, and custom objects. Not only is this a huge time saver for you, but you will love this because keeping clean data just got much easier.

For example, you have created a quick action Updated Lead on the Lead object, as shown in the following screenshot:

Now while using the list view you can now choose the above quick action to bulk update the lead records: