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. In this release, you will find lots of new features, as well as, new enhancements related to Lightning Experience and Communities.
For example, features like, Get Guidance for Data Protection and Privacy Regulations, Show Your True Colors with Themes in Lightning, Get Search Results for More Objects, and Opportunities: Opportunity Splits, Opportunity Product Name Visibility, Price Book Selection are now available in Lightning Experience.
Also, check out these beta and pilot features:
- Einstein Forecasting: Intelligent Predictions About Your Sales Teams (Beta): – Let Einstein take the guesswork out of forecasting. Use artificial intelligence to get more certainty and visibility into how your sales teams are doing. Einstein improves your forecasting accuracy with predictions about your sales team’s opportunities based on past data.
- Set Different Login Policies for Salesforce and Community Users (Beta): – If you have a community set up in your org, you can now specify different login policies for internal and external users. For example, you can set up less restrictive access policies for employees that log in to your community, but external users are subject to profile IP restrictions.
- Track Progress Through a Flow with Stages (Beta): – Now you can indicate a user’s point in the flow using the new stage resource and two new system variables: {!$Flow.ActiveStages} and {!$Flow.CurrentStage}. For example, indicate where in a purchasing flow the user is with breadcrumbs or a progress indicator.
Reference Salesforce release notes
- Lightning Experience Report Builder: Buckets, Cross Filters, and Summary Formulas (Beta): – The second beta release of the Lightning Experience report builder lets you categorize report data with buckets, include or exclude results from related objects with cross filters, and summarize data in new ways with summary formula columns.
- Set Up Call Monitoring (Beta): –Improve selling techniques by enabling Call Monitoring from the Dialer Settings page in Setup. This feature is new in Lightning Experience.
- Call JavaScript Directly from Your Flow with Local Actions (Pilot): – Now you can pull data from an on-premises or private cloud database directly into your flow without going through the Salesforce server. Or do things directly in the browser, such as open a particular URL or confirm that a record was created with a toast message. With flow local actions, you can call the JavaScript controller of an associated Lightning component, which means you can integrate directly with the browser.
- Encrypt Activities, Email Messages, Emails to Case, and Custom Object Name (Pilot): – Emails and time management tools play an important role in your day-to-day workflow. For another layer of security and compliance controls, you can now encrypt Activities, Email Messages, Email-to-Case messages, and Custom Object Name.
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.
Lightning Experience is supported by Apple® Safari® version 11.x+ on Mac OS X. The most recent stable versions of Microsoft® Edge, Mozilla® Firefox®, and Google Chrome™ are also supported. Salesforce now offering Extended Support for IE11. This extended support is available through December 31, 2020. You ca not access Lightning Experience via a mobile browser.
Salesforce Classic is supported with Microsoft® Internet Explorer® version 9, 10, and 11, Apple® Safari® version 11.x on Mac OS. The most recent stable versions of Microsoft® Edge, Firefox®, and Google Chrome™ are also supported.
Below is the quick summary of Spring’18 release from user’s /customer’s
Customers/Users Point of view
1. Supercharge Your Productivity with Personalized Navigation in Lightning Experience: – You can now personalize navigation in Lightning Experience is similar to customized tab sets in Salesforce Classic but better. In Lightning Experience, the navigation bar can contain more than just object-level items, like Accounts. You can add granular items, like a dashboard, list, or record.
Salesforce has given you more ways to navigate with temporary tabs. Use temporary tabs to access important items directly from the navigation bar. For example, open a frequently used dashboard in a temporary tab to access it instantly from anywhere.
2. 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.
