Salesforce Spring 15 Release Notes- First Look

It’s that time of year again. The birds are chirping, flowers are blooming, and… and who am I kidding? It’s January and I’m frozen. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be spring in your Salesforce org. Yes, it’s that time of year again. Time to get ready for a Spring release and many new features!

There are a ton of resources out there for pretty much every release. And with the release notes now topping about 400 pages there is a little something for everyone. From blogs recapping Spring features, to posts about preparing for releases. So let’s give you a handy dandy list of resources you should bookmark for every release. Take note of the URLs, if they have a specific date in them like Spring 15, chances are good that you can replace Spring with Summer or Winter and the URL will point you to the most recent release information (safe harbor).

Spring ’15 Resources:

• Release Site
• Release Dates
  
• Release Notes
• Release Preview
• Release Readiness Live
• Sandbox Preview Instructions
• Pre-Release Sign-Up
• Demos
• Developerforce

Support

• Known Issues

The 5 Spring 15 Features I’m looking forward to the most!

Lightning Process Builder

As a Salesforce Admin this is by far one of the most exciting features in the Spring 15 release. With Lightning Process Builder you can easily automate everything from daily tasks, like follow-up emails, to more complex processes, like order renewals and new-hire onboarding. In just a few clicks you can automate business processes and help your organization operate more efficiently.

Check out my post on ‘Getting Ready for Lightning Process Builder‘ to start preparing your org to move off of workflows and into a more powerful way of keeping processes up to date.

Duplicate Management

As a Salesforce Admin there is no doubt you spend part of your week cleaning up duplicate data. In Spring 15 your job just got a lot easier with Duplicate Management. Now you can control whether and when you allow users to create duplicate records inside Salesforce; customize the logic that’s used to identify duplicates; and create reports on the duplicates you do allow users to save.

Sales Path

As a Salesforce Administrator I got tons of requests for a ‘sales path like’ visualization. And without jumping to code, one just wasn’t available. With Spring 15 one is! Sales Path guides your reps through each stage of your company’s sales process and helps them stay focused on important sales tasks, so your reps can close their deals quickly. Sales Path has a simple, easy to use setup interface so that you can quickly configure your sales path. Whether you are a full time Admin or part-time, Sales Path can be setup quickly and it gives your sales people a quick win. Plus it also gives you a reason to engage with Sales and help streamline their processes.

Social Customer Service Starter Pack

It’s really not even a question of IF someone is on Facebook or Twitter anymore. So as a Salesforce Admin we have to make sure that our company is providing the same level of customer service to our social customers as well as all the other channels we serve. With the Social Customer Service Starter Pack you connect your Facebook and Twitter accounts directly from Salesforce and deliver social customer care without a separate Radian6 contract.

This is a great way for you as an Admin to show the possibilities of Salesforce and providing quality customer service with every channel. And upgrading is easy to a Radian6 contract- then you can really supercharge your organization!

Create or Edit Records owned by inactive Users

Gah. It’s the end of the day and your sales user has one last update to make. Except the record is owned by a deactivated user. And before you can scurry out of the office your phone rings. Because you as the Admin can only update records owned by inactive users. You were so close to making it out the door, but now you will be running behind. Good news for you-With Spring ’15, administrators and all users with the create or edit permission can create or edit accounts, opportunities, and custom object records that are owned by inactive users. For example, you can create an account and assign an inactive user as the record owner. Or you can edit the Account Name field on an opportunity record that is owned by an inactive user to change its parent account.

What features are you looking forward to the most? Tweet them using the hashtag #AwesomeAdmin and share them with a community of Salesforce admins!