Salesforce Summer’ 19 is coming.  As the the last release was a clear success, the popular features included in it may give us some insights on the key areas Salesforce is working on. Enventiva has selected a few topics that may come back on the soon to come release.

Preparing the Transition to Lighting Experience

Lightning Experience, the new interface for the Salesforce Platform, isn’t yet deployed in all Salesforce products. With the global shift towards Lighting Experience into sights, Salesforce now includes in its releases various tools to help organizations be ready for the transition.

For example, Salesforce has built a Transition Assistant to ensure a smooth and progressive shift for everyone. This wizard guides companies through all the recommended steps and activities required to prepare the transition. A Knowledge Migration Tool is also proposed to migrate existing knowledge bases from Salesforce Classic to Lightning.

The Summer’ 19 release will probably continue down this road, as the switch is planned for Winter’ 20 on a rolling basis.

A Focus on Productivity and Collaboration

As usual, the CRM vendor also delivers in each release many enhancements, both for business users and technical teams. For business users, the last one brought a lot of new features. We have chosen to highlight a few of them, that may be extended in the next release.

Built-in features based on Salesforce Einstein

Among the key features around Einstein artificial intelligence technology that became available, here are our favorite:

  • With Einstein Case Classification for Service Cloud, recommendations can automatically be displayed to help agents manage cases more quickly. Because Einstein uses historical data to learn how to classify cases, companies need to have at least 1000 cases, but Salesforce recommends 10,000 or more for best performance.
  • Companies that use Lightning Experience can benefit from Einstein Data Insights. This feature extends Einstein Analytics. It summarizes key learnings from reports through charts and metrics.
  • Einstein can now also be used to score prospects in Pardot, based on their behavior.

Einstein is clearly a key technology for Salesforce, that builds more and more value-added services on it. We bet that the Summer’ 19 release will also unveil new smart features based on Einstein.

Support for Mobile and Multicultural Communities

A lot of improvements were also brought to communities. For example, with Salesforce Mobile Publisher, communities can now be turned into mobile apps in a few steps, without any coding.

Google Translation API was also included into Lighting communities, to easily translate all types of contents. For companies that evolve in a multinational or multicultural context, this can be used to build extended communities, that gather expertise from all around the world.

Sales Cadences to Enforce Lead Management Best Practices

In Sales Cloud, Salesforce has deployed High Velocity Sales. This workspace is designed to enhance the productivity of sales representatives, through features like sales cadences: these are customized sales processes, with a scheduled list of activities to follow up with prospects. A work queue shows all the leads ready for each step.

Embedding Quip Documents Into Salesforce

Quip is a collaborative suite bought by Salesforce in 2016. Since the acquisition, the software vendor has added many useful features to this solution, such as Quid Slides, a tool to create and share presentations. Salesforce has also made a comprehensive work to seamlessly integrate Quip with its platform. The last release kept to this road, with a Beta feature to embed directly Quip documents into Lightning apps.

Recently (March 2019), Salesforce also unveiled Quip for Service, a productivity and collaboration tool aimed at service agents. Employees can now directly interact with each other while they’re managing a case. They can also request help from experts without leaving their Salesforce environment.

Security and Application Development Made Easier

On the technical side, Salesforce last release also delivered useful improvements on strategic areas, such as security, usability and performance. The vendor pays special attention to ensure a smooth experience for everyone who uses Salesforce, from the end-user to the developer: we will probably find similar enhancements in the next release.

Security Enhancements

New authentication and identity features were added, both to simplify the login process and to extend security. For example, on the login page, users no longer have to choose between various login options, such as SSO (Single-Sign On) or Salesforce passwords. They just have to enter an identifier, like a phone number, and the solution automatically redirects them to the appropriate authentication page.

In its previous release, Salesforce also introduced certificate-based authentication, another option for companies which have to comply with specific requirements.

A more intuitive Flow Builder

Salesforce also developed a new Flow Builder, available both in Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic. Now it replaces Cloud Flow Designer. All the interface has been redesigned to be more intuitive. For example, the toolbox now gathers the various components by key categories, such as Data, Logic or Actions.

Lightning Web Components for Improved Performance

These components, built on HTML and JavaScript, leverage the latest Web standards. They use a lightweight programming model that delivers improved performance. They can be used in conjunction with Lightning native components, renamed Aura Components.

Icing on the cake: with Salesforce last release, all existing customers received a gift from Salesforce: an extended data storage, with 10 additional gigabytes. Will Summer’19 bring surprises as well? Come back soon to know.