It may still be mid-Winter, but at least we have the Salesforce Spring ’16 release to keep us going through the cold, dark days.
Much of the Spring ’16 release notes focus on Lightning Experience, and we are excited to see a great deal of improvements and additions to the new UI. This season’s release also includes some useful updates to Salesforce Classic. Below are our favourite elements, keep an eye out for these coming soon!
Mark your calendars with these key dates of the official rollouts.
For Developers:
Run Scripts After Sandbox Creation and Refresh
What once was an empty sandbox can now be filled with sample data and basic configuration using custom scripts!
Increased Developer Sandbox Licenses
From a developer standpoint, separate modules should be created in independent sandboxes. The previous limits on sandboxes made it very difficult if you had multiple modules or sets of modules. Now Enterprise Edition will come with 25 sandboxes to play in.
Create Test Suites of Commonly Used Apex Test Classes
The custom modules we build for our clients are sometimes associated to more than one test class. With test suites we are able to group our tests. When working on a module with a large amount of test classes, this new feature will save our developers a considerable amount of time and clicks.
For Admins and Users:
Global Picklists (universal picklists) values.
Currently in beta for Spring 2016, we are excited for the future, official rollout of this update! Global picklists can be used for all standard and custom objects, saving administrators a lot of time when configuring their orgs, if the picklist values are the same across multiple objects. This update also ensures that values are perfectly consistent across an org.
If you have a Developer Edition org or sandbox org, no setup is required. For all other editions, contact Salesforce to enable global picklists.
Emails within Lightning Experience
Lightning Experience may be the most talked-about Salesforce feature in the last several months, critique and praise alike.
A small but powerful element of Lightning Experience is the new email composer in the form of a pop-out window, which you can use to send emails from campaign and case records. The UI of the composer is visually pleasing, and is reminiscent of Gmail. Specifically, you can minimize the composer within Salesforce without having to toggle back and forth between browser windows.
View Dynamic Dashboards as Other Users in Lightning Experience
What previously required sharing rules or permissions, you will now be able to easily view a dashboard as someone else within your org. We can see this update being incredibly beneficial for team leaders, regional employees, and other users who often find themselves straddling multiple departments and hierarchies.
Dashboards are not immediately available to other users, however. You will still grant some overall access to your dashboards. First, set up your dashboard so that it runs as the logged-in user. Then allow authorized users to change the running user. Thereafter, users with the “View My Team’s Dashboards” or “View All Data” permission will be able to view your dashboard as someone else.
You can access the full release notes here.
-The Pracedo Team
