Summer ’17 Admin Preview Recap

Summer ’17 is here! A few weeks ago, we recorded the Admin Preview for Release Readiness Live to help you get the short(ish) list of the features we think are the most exciting for Admins in this release. All of these features are in Lightning, but don’t fret if you are still using Classic! Use this as an opportunity to get up to speed with Lightning so that when your organization is ready to make the switch, you can be the ambassador for rolling it out.

Lightning Customization Updates

Have you ever tried to rearrange the layout of a page in Classic? Aside from moving fields and related lists around, you can’t do much to change how the page looks using clicks. With Lightning, we can design pages to look the way we want using the Lightning App Builder by dragging & dropping components into a variety of templates. This means we can create a custom home, app, and record pages for our various use cases.

Now, we can play with dynamic Lightning record pages with the Summer ’17 pilot! This is really cool because now we can display specific components on a page based on values on the record. For example, you could display a related list component for a custom object like related projects once the deal reaches a certain stage. This is like super-charged validation rules or automation at work. No more creating complex workflow rules, record types, and page layouts to change how a record is displayed as the stages or field values change. You can use rules and logic to update a record page as the information on the record changes. You can get access to this pilot feature by asking your account team.

Einstein for Admins

We’ve been excitedly talking about Einstein since Dreamforce, so let’s dig in and start figuring out what Einstein really means for Admins. With Summer ’17, every Admin can run an Einstein Readiness Report. This report tells us how our org would work with Einstein, and identifies areas where we might need more data or setup, and which Einstein features we can set up now. This is a great way to start examining Einstein and figuring out how it could work with your business.

For us Admins, Einstein is a way to get Artificial Intelligence into our system without having to go through the long, traditional process of data sampling, modeling, scoring, and integration. Once we run our Einstein Readiness Report and decide to use Einstein features, we can start setting it up by going through the Einstein Setup Assistant to guide us through the process. The first step is to set up a permission set to allow users to use Einstein. Then we can set up the Einstein features we want and configure details declaratively. For more information on how to use Einstein, go through the Get Smart with Einstein Trail on Trailhead.

Customization Features for Admins

There are a ton of amazing features in Summer ’17 that make it easier for us to customize the platform. We had to limit our list to fit into the show, so these features are just a small subset of the greater list of what our incredible product teams have delivered this release to make our lives easier.

• New & improved Lightning Migration Assistant with separate tabs to prepare for your roll-out.
• You can now limit your users’ ability to access to Classic, ensuring that your users are getting the most functionality out of your Lightning customizations, and maintain one experience for your users.
• Object Manager is more amazing than ever! We now have a better way to navigate through all our standard & custom objects elements – no more CTRL+F – because now we have a split screen view of each object & its elements.
• Promote your existing picklists into global value sets so you can use them as global picklists across your org.
• The Flow component is GA! It’s now official, we can drag & drop any visual workflow we’ve built into home pages, record pages, app pages, and even into the utility bar in any Lightning app.
• Optimizer Report is your new best friend. It enables you to keep track of file & data storage limits, page layouts that aren’t assigned to record types, record types that aren’t assigned to profiles, roles that aren’t assigned to users, users who access Salesforce on unsupported browsers, and even unused reports and dashboards.

Productivity Features for Your End Users

Summer ’17 also has some great productivity features your end users will love. These are some of our favorites that you can demo for your end users to get them up to speed with the release.

• Chatter Streams have gotten better. When you follow a user, record, or even a topic, you can now select which stream to add them to.
• Topics are in Lightning. We missed them, so we’re happy they are back because it helps users track & categorize conversations across chatter.
• Search is more useful. Have a spelling issue? Search now shows you results for spell-corrected terms. You can also now search for opportunities by account name and get search results for Topics.
• Split view for console is now a thing, and it is an awesome time saver. Use the split view to navigate between records in a list view, and even change which list view you are working with.
• Users can now hover over a case to view important info without having to open the case record.
• Keyboard shortcuts are back! View them by typing Ctrl+/ (Windows) or Cmd+/ (macOS).
• Dashboard filters make it easy for users to view different data sets in one dashboard, so you can build one dashboard to do the job of multiple dashboards & filtered reports.

What You Should Do Today

There are so many great new things in Summer ’17 to check out, but here’s what we think you should do today:

1) Run your Optimizer Report: Setup | Optimizer or from SalesforceA
2) Run (or re-run) your Lightning Readiness Check: Setup | Lightning Experience Migration Assistant or from SalesforceA
3) Run your Einstein Readiness Report: Setup | Sales | Sales Cloud Einstein | Readiness Check

To get all the blogs, podcasts, and webinars about Summer’ 17, go here.