Spring ’17 Release Overview for Admins

The Salesforce Spring ‘17 release is packed full of awesome Lightning Experience features you won’t want to miss out on! We’re taking productivity to a whole new level with features like inline edits in List Views, Favorites, Utility Bar and Lightning Console Apps. We highlighted our favorites in the Salesforce Admin release webinar: Spring ’17 Release Overview with LeeAnne Templeman and Mike Gerholdt.

You can watch the recording of that webinar here:

Or, read what features we highlighted in the webinar, below.

Features Your Users Will Love

Chatter streams: Customize your chatter feed into different streams with updates to features you care about, like group opportunities, cases, people & more. For example, I created a Chatter stream with my teammates in it so I can surface their updates.
Inline editing in List View: Breeze through record updates with inline editing in List View. Instead of clicking into each record, simply edit the record data right in the List View and move on with your work!
Kanban everywhere: Display records visually on (almost) any list view. Outside of using Kanban for opportunity management, you can now use it for custom objects. For example, if you have a custom project tracking object, you can easily manage, update and review projects using the Kanban view.

• Customize your Kanban Settings in List View Controls
• Choose your Summarize By and Group By field for standard and custom objects

Favorites: Users can curate and maintain their own personal list of useful content. Favorites are managed by individual users & can’t be shared or edited by admins. You can favorite more than 200 features. However, some items that you cannot favorite include Files, Tasks, and Notes. Read through the release notes for further details.

Features Admins Will Love

Utility Bar: Get quick access to common productivity tools, like Notes and Recent Items. Utility bar appears as a fixed footer on the bottom of your screen that you can access to open utilities in docked panels.

• Enhance your Lightning Experience Apps with productivity tools, like chatter or notes
• Add to any Standard Lightning or Console Apps
• Configure without code

Lightning Console Apps (Beta): Create and customize a console app in minutes in Lightning Experience. Use console apps to give your users a productivity boost by allowing them to edit and reference multiple records at once.

• Work with multiple workspaces & tabs
• Pin Tabs for quick access
• Navigate between apps quickly

Path: Visually display the steps in a process, highlight key fields, and provide guidance such as handy links, policy information, and tips to users at each step.

• Highlight custom business processes
• Available for Quotes & Custom Objects
• Path pays attention to required fields

Flow Component: Expose Flow screens in Lightning Pages, Utility Bar with no code.

• Fields can be grouped and organized to make more sense to the end-user
• Make better use of screen real estate and fit more on a single screen to help end-users work faster and digest information quicker

Release Best Practices

Outside of reviewing the features mentioned in this post and webinar, there are more steps to planning for Salesforce releases. Here are your next steps:

• Take the Spring ’17 Release Module on Trailhead
• Getting a pre-release org
• Reading the Release Notes
• Watching Release Readiness Live
• Reviewing what Sandboxes you need to refresh
• Joining the Release Readiness Group in Success Community
• Reading these posts:
  • 3 steps to prepare for every release
  • Release Notes: 3 tips to find what you need