Top Ten Gems of Salesforce Lightning Experience Winter’21 Release!

With each new release, Salesforce is adding tons of new functionalities to Lightning Experience. Which make you more productive and help you to provide better customer experience. 

Currently, Winter’21 release is under the pre-release program. On the 11th & 12th of September, Sandboxes will be upgraded, as a result, your organization will get the look and feel of Winter’21 release. 

In case you have not read the entire 531 pages of Salesforce Winter’21 release notes, check out Winter’21 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 Winter’21 release. 

1. Break Up Your Record Details with Dynamic Forms (Generally Available): Dynamic Forms is the next step in the evolution of Lightning record pages. It adds the ability to configure record detail fields and sections inside the Lightning App Builder.

   
   With more fields on your page layout, the more that the Record Detail component becomes a monolithic block of fields that you can’t customize. With Dynamic Forms, you can migrate the fields and sections from your page layout as individual components into the Lightning App Builder. Then, you can configure them just like the rest of the components on the page, and give users only the fields and sections that they need.
   

   Dynamic Forms benefit you in these ways.

   • An instant upgrade from page layouts: Place fields and sections wherever you want.
   • Better page performance: Put fields and sections into accordion components or tabs to significantly improve page load times.
   • Dynamic layouts: Use visibility rules to show and hide fields and sections.
   • Simpler layout management:
     • Manage the fields and sections on your pages in the Lightning App Builder without touching the page layout editor.
     • Reduce the number of page layouts you need with component visibility rules.
     • Take advantage of a single assignment model for the Lightning page instead of the dual model of assigning a Lightning page and a page layout.

   To enable Dynamic Forms in your org, navigate to Setup (Gear Icon) | Setup | User Interface | Record Page Settings and then click on the Dynamic Forms section, flip the switch to On.

   

   After you enable Dynamic Forms, new features appear in the Lightning App Builder. A new Fields tab in the component palette contains Field and Field Section components, which are the building blocks for Dynamic Forms.

   

   To get started? Open an existing record page in the Lightning App Builder, then click Upgrade Now from the Record Detail properties pane to launch the Dynamic Forms migration wizard. With only a few clicks, the wizard adds fields and field sections to the page for you.

2. Auto Add Fields to Custom Report Types (Beta):- It’s time-consuming to add new custom fields to your reports, especially when you have many custom report types. Now with Auto Add, custom fields that you add to a Salesforce object are added automatically to all the custom report types based on that object. When you create a report from the custom report type, all the custom fields are right there for you to add to your report.
3. Add In-App Guidance to New, Edit, and Clone Page: – Help users along as they create, edit, and clone records, including dialogs, with in-app guidance.
4. Salesforce Anywhere: Plan and Accelerate Your Business in Real-Time (Beta): -Salesforce Anywhere making Salesforce real-time. Get alerts about changes to the Salesforce data you care about. Update your Salesforce data in just a few taps with suggested actions. Collaborate in context with chat. Search and view your Salesforce data. And integrate Salesforce Anywhere chat and alerts into your business processes with Lightning Flow and Process Builder. 
5. Easily Coordinate When to Meet with Insert Free Time in Lightning Experience: – When emailing someone to set up a meeting, your reps can include their available time slots. The email recipient then selects from among the choices, and the meeting is automatically added to everyone’s calendar.
6. Optimize the Opportunity Scoring Model: – Fine-tuning your scoring model can yield more accurate scores. When setting up Einstein Opportunity Scoring, you can choose to have Einstein look only at opportunities that meet certain conditions. Also, decide if you want Einstein to exclude any custom opportunity fields from the scoring model.
7. Boost Agent Productivity with Prebuilt Macros: – New prebuilt Macros let agents control cases and send mass emails to customers with a streamlined interaction.
8. Display Survey Pages Based on Your Data: – Now you can use your data in Salesforce org to determine which survey page participants view next. Use variables to define conditions in your page branching logic. Use associated record merge field variables and participant record merge field variables to define field-level conditions. Use org variables to define conditions based on your org’s information. Use custom variables to define conditions based on values that you define.
9. Update Opportunity Stages on the Forecasts Page in Lightning Experience: – Forecasts users can now update stages in the opportunity list without leaving the forecasts page. Previously, inline editing was available for other fields, but not for Stage.
10. Find Changed Deals at a Glance:- Opportunity deal change highlights help your sales team prioritize work by showing recent changes to amounts and close dates. For example, knowing which deals changed helps sales managers with their weekly coaching sessions. In the opportunities list view and Kanban view, text colors and arrows indicate amounts and close dates that changed during the last 7 days. And users can hover over an arrow to get detail.
    

Formative Assessment:

What is your favorite Winter’21 Lightning Experience gems? Care to share?

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

Let me know by Tweeting me at @automationchamp, or find me on LinkedIn.