The Most Impressive Features of Salesforce Spring ’15 – part 1

Salesforce announced its Spring ’15 Release. As a team of Salesforce-certified professionals, we would love to share our insights on Salesforce Spring ’15.

1. Lightning Process Builders Now Generally Available

The Lightning Process Builder is a perfect tool for displaying and managing workflow information. Previously, users had to create an Apex trigger to build workflows for any record. With this update, users can create/update records, send emails, and post directly to Chatter – all with the help of Visual Builder. The Process Builder also lets users use Apex classes by invoking the @InvocableMethod annotation to implement additional logic.

Advantages: Simple and more powerful design; more flexible Process Builder. Now it’s easy to start creating automated business processes.

 2. Analytics Cloud Is Designed For Everyone

For a long time we’ve been waiting for something that would help us to see our data in the easiest form. And finally, help has arrived! Analytics Cloud is a platform for business users, developers, and analysts that makes our data fun and intuitive for any user.
Salesforce’s Analytics Cloud is designed to be mobile friendly, with the ability to retrieve data from any source. It works on any device but Salesforce did not stop there. You can also change any report as you want it from the dashboard view. You can also share your analytics information with anyone in your chatter group. Looks great!

Advantages: Analytics Cloud enables you to access any data.
Anyone can access powerful insights and let the data tell a story. Business intelligence available for everyone

 3. Chatter Is More Sociable Now

Salesforce inspires users to communicate more! Chatter now has several improvements to files, feeds, and unlisted groups functionality. Chatter Feeds now grants users the ability to create a task from a post and to use emoticons. It’s also easier to quickly resolve user issues via Question-to-Case. With this, a moderator can raise a question about a certain case directly in the feed, which helps inform and engage users about the latest clients’ needs and wishes.

Advantages: Allows for a wide range of activities inside your organization (add records to groups, create cases from Chatter questions, etc.). Improvements to files, feeds, and unlisted groups functionality. Simplified and improved communication process inside the organization.

4. Email Connect-New Product Area

Salesforce Spring ‘15 also features brand-new email integration features. The first one, Exchange Sync, synchronizes your own contacts and events between Exchange emails and Salesforce without any further installation. Salesforce worked further and made one more useful feature. Salesforce App for Outlook allows users to manage their Salesforce contacts directly in the app or in Outlook 2013. It’s great, isn’t it?

Advantages: Easy to sync contacts and users to Salesforce from your Outlook and Exchange

 5. Salesforce1: Reporting Enhancements

We’ve observed an impressive 66 new features in the Spring ’15 Release of Salesforce1, which only proves that it intends to continue developing a mobile version.

We’ve noticed the object homepage has become more flexible for users. Now, a user has access and can use up to 200 List Views (the filters displaying the object records). It has also sorted the columns in the search results page, allowing users to get a complete view of records. We can easily see the results of our actions in a graph form directly in the list view page. Before this useful feature, we have had to create a report or dashboard. Moreover, Salesforce1 has become more sociable: now it’s quite easy to get the latest news directly to your account’s home page and to connect to Twitter, Yahoo or any RSS feed.

Advantages: Object homepage, search result, list view, account news are more functional now. Easier to get information about the data and the latest news.

6. More Force.com Features Are Available Now

We also noticed some changes in Force.com development. Now, it offers users the ability to deploy components in less time and it’s Generally Available. You can now deploy components to production and skip execution for all the tests that have been confirmed within the last 4 days. It’s definitely a huge time saver!

It is also available to deploy and retrieve more components. Before that we had to split the data, which led to a long selection and grouping process. But with the new features, the limit was set up by introducing to 5,000 files in a single deploy process.

Advantages: Deploying components in less time and it’s generally available. The number of files that can be retrieved or deployed have doubled.

In this review, we tried to figure out the most significant features for us and our customers. We found that Salesforce Spring ’15 has a great amount of new features which cannot leave anybody indifferent. In the next part we will continue discussing new features of Salesforce Spring’ 15 Release.