Spring into Top Ten Gems of Salesforce Lightning Experience Spring19 Release!

Last Updated on April 15, 2022 by Rakesh Gupta

With each new release, Lightning Experience is getting faster, quicker and easier to maintain. Spring’19 release will give you plethora of reasons to switch to Lighting Experience. 

Migrate to avoid migraine!

Starting October 2019, with the Winter ’20 release, Salesforce will turn on Lightning Experience for all orgs on a rolling basis. What does it mean? If you are still using Salesforce Classic user interface, you have only 9 months (Approximately, 190 Working Days) before Salesforce turns on Lightning Experience in your Org. As a result, you have limited time to plan and migrate to Lightning Experience.

Now what? Well, you have two options: 

1. Take advantage of the lead time – before Lightning Experience is turned on – to understand how your org’s features and customizations perform in the new interface and prepare your users via change management.
2. Or, hmm… ugh! adopt ‘head in the sand’ approach – i.e., don’t do anything until October 2019 – and invite migraine!

Since the choice seems like a no-brainer, what is your game plan?

What? Don’t have one? No worries! Check out this article by Salesforce.com, Inc. The article will give you enough knowledge to start, plan and execute your Lightning Migration. Since you are at it, also check out my article on Lightning migration. 

Currently, Spring’19 release is available under the pre-release program. Sandboxes will be upgraded on 4th and 5th of January. As a result, your organization will get the look and feel of Spring’19 release.

In case you have not read the entire 429 pages of Salesforce Spring’19 release notes, check out Spring’19 release quick summary written by me. 

I combed through the release notes and highlighted the most exciting, interesting, and useful Lightning Experience features. Since Lightning Experience is getting faster and better with every release, it was a challenge to stop at just ten! To kick things off, here is my take on the coolest Lightning features from Spring’19 release.

1) Use Thanks Badges in Lightning Experience (Pilot):- Sing your praises from the mountaintops, or at least from your Chatter feed. Thanks badges are now available in Lightning Experience. Let your coworkers know how much you value them with our suite of thanks badges.

2) Quickly Focus on Relevant Data with Conditional Formatting (Beta):- It is now possible to apply conditional formatting to reports in Lightning Experience. You can now apply up to five formatting rules to a report in a Lightning Experience. And, you can define up to three bins for each rule you apply. Setting the color for each bin is not only faster but now, you can also customize colors! Please note that conditional formatting is only available in the summary or matrix report.

3) Add Custom Resources to the Refreshed Lightning Experience Help Menu: – Salesforce has redesigned the Help Menu to make room for your own resources. Guide users as they work in your org with links to your own URLs to websites, PDF files, videos, or Trailhead mixes. A getting-started section helps both users and admins to get on-boarded to the new user experience. Everyone can now search for, and see, documentation results from within the Help Menu. To customize the Help menu, perform the following steps:  

1. Navigates to Setup | Onboarding & Assistance | Help Menu 
2. Add Section Title Label, to let the users know this help menu is related to your company. 
3. Add few Custom Resource Links
4. Once done click on the Save button. 
5. In the end, Turn on the customize help menu. 
6. If you want to turn off Salesforce-provided help menu, follow this step(#6) as shown in the following screenshot. 

Now Let’s see how it looks at the runtime.

This change applies to Lightning Experience. 

4) Share your Feedback with Salesforce: – It is now easier for you, and your users, to share their feedback with Salesforce. Salesforce is continually innovating based on user feedbacks. For your convenience, Salesforce provides a ‘Feedback Form’ in Lightning Experience. System Administrators may disable the form if they so wish.

This feature takes effects in March 2019.

5) Get Product Family Forecasts by Territory: – Now that sales teams can forecast product family revenue by sales territory, they have a clearer understanding of their forecasts. For example, they can see how well software is selling in Canada and which product family is lagging in Arizona. Previously, territory forecasts were available only for opportunity revenue forecasts.

If Enterprise Territory Management is enabled, forecast users can forecast product family revenue by territory.

6) Sync Events and Contacts with Einstein Activity Capture:- This productivity-boosting feature does more than just associate email and events to related Salesforce records. ‘Einstein Activity Capture’ now syncs events and contacts between sales reps’ Google or Microsoft® accounts and Salesforce. With everything captured, and in sync, reps can get back to more important things – like selling! Syncing occurs for Einstein Activity Capture users that meet the following criteria.

• The email account on their user record is connected to Salesforce.
• You add them to an Einstein Activity Capture configuration that includes syncing.

This change applies to Lightning Experience. 

7) Jump Right into Your Most Important List View with Pinned Lists: – Do you have a go-to list view that you want to load as your default list? Now you can. With pinned lists, all users can make any list as their new default.

To pin an unpinned list, click its pin icon. To pin a different list, select the list view and pin it instead. The default pinned list for all objects is Recently Viewed.

8) Verify Your Customer Communications with Email Draft Approval: – Control messaging between your agents – using Lightning Experience – and your customers, to ensure that the content is as amazing as your company. Require that agents send email drafts to designated approvers when they’re communicating with customers. Previously, email draft approval for case emails was available only in Salesforce Classic.

To use the aforementioned feature, enable email draft approvals in Setup on the Service Settings page. Then, configure a workflow process for approval and rejection

Note: – You can download release notes in HTML format!, for PDF file.