Our Favorite Lightning Features in the Winter ’17 Release

The Winter ’17 Release is (almost) here! There are a ton of features for Salesforce Admins in this release, new ways to customize, automate even more efficiently, and increase user success and adoption. This release is also packed with features you know and love from Salesforce Classic now available in Lightning Experience, as well as exciting new features for Admins, Developers, Users that are available only in Lightning Experience.

Here are a few of the most exciting features for Admins:

Call a Process from Another Process: As a longtime fan of Process Builder, I am so excited about this functionality. Now you can build a process that another process can invoke. This allows you to organize your processes better, and create processes that are triggered by specific events, and criteria being to evaluate within another process. For example, if I can create a process to trigger whenever a new lead is created, within that process I can add multiple criteria trees that evaluate the type of lead that was added and then fire different campaign based processes based on which type of lead it is. Available in Lightning & Classic.
** Make sure to visit the Success Group for Salesforce Workflow Automation to learn more.

Assign a Custom Record Page to Lightning Apps, or Make It the Default for All: When you activate a custom record page in the Lightning App Builder, you now have two options. You can make the record page the default for all your users. Or you can assign the record page to one or more Lightning apps to give your users access to a page customized for the app that they’re working in. This is a big win for Admins. Now you can define a custom record page for different types of users depending on which Lightning App they are using. Only in Lightning.
** Learn more about Lightning App Builder in the Success Community Group

Inline Edit and Mass Actions in Lightning Experience: One of the most requested features in Lightning, Inline Editing on List Views is now available for Lightning Experience! Users can edit records in a Lightning List view and save all without having to leave the list view screen or open the record. Users can also add multiple campaign members from a list view and make ownership changes to multiple records at once in Lightning. New to Lightning.
**IdeaExchange idea delivered with this feature.

Picklists! Picklists can be an Admins best friend when it comes to creating easy methods of data input and managing data quality and they get a boost in functionality and ease of administration in this release. Global Picklists are now generally available in both Salesforce Classic and Lightning Experience. Create a global value set of picklist values and use it for new picklist fields on multiple custom or standard objects. This is a huge time saver and data quality win if you have duplicate picklist fields on different objects, now you can create, manage and update the values from one place in setup. There are more picklist features to check out, like using a Shared Value Set As the Controlling Picklist for Your Local Picklist, and making an existing custom picklist required.
**To provide feedback or suggestions for global picklists visit the Global, Restricted Custom Picklists group in the Salesforce Success Community.

Cool features coming in Beta or Pilot

Every release Salesforce releases a set of features to Beta and Pilot. Here are a few of the features to check out.

Flow Component in Lightning Pages (Beta):

We’re rolling out a flow component for the Lightning App Builder. You can now add flows to any Lightning page–App pages, Record pages, and Home pages alike. Lightning pages are supported in Lightning Experience and all flavors of Salesforce1.

Lightning for Gmail & Sync Calendar Events from Gcal to Salesforce (Beta):

If your company is on Gmail, check out our latest email integration that lets users view Salesforce records from Gmail and sync their Gcal events to Salesforce.

These are just a few of the exciting features for Admins coming in this release. Make sure to check out the Winter ‘17 Release Notes to learn more detail about these features and everything else delivered this release. The best place to stay up to date on timelines, updates, and news regarding every release is the Release Readiness Group on the Success Community.