Interview: Spring ’18 Admin Features with Michael Gonzalez

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast we’re talking to Michael Gonzalez, Director Product Management at Salesforce, to find out what’s coming in Spring ‘18 that can help Admins be more productive. For February and March, we’re setting our sights on productivity with a series of topics to help you focus on being a productive Admin and how you can deliver productivity to your users.

Join us as Michael Gonzalez tells us about the new features that will help us be more productive as Admins delivering more functionality to our end users.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Michael Gonzalez.

The amazing new changes to App Builder.

Spring ‘18 is chock full of amazing stuff, for Michael and the App Builder team, “it’s a mega release, I think we’ve got more features than we’ve had in any of the prior ones.” One the biggest things that you can do is open up and edit an app right in App Builder, you have everything in one place. As Michael put it, “Our little App Builder has grown up from a simple page editor to a full-grown app builder experience.”

Michael spent a lot of time on the road at Lightning Now tours getting feedback. One of the big things that he heard about App Builder was, “Hey, this is nice, but can we bring things together and remove the number of steps I need take in order to manage these things?” Consolidation was a big goal for this release, and his team has done a lot to make everything about building an app better and more streamlined.

Lightning gets even more… dynamic.

Another cool thing coming Spring ‘18 is building on the dynamic pages idea and giving more flexibility and control. It lets you change up what your user sees on the page based on what’s happened. Before Winter ‘18, anything like that had to be done in custom code with the help of a developer, but Michael and his team made it doable with zero code required.

Dynamic pages were showcased at Dreamforce this year, which gave Michael and his team the opportunity to collect a lot of great feedback to make this feature even better. For Spring, you can create a dynamic homepage experience based on what user is viewing the page, or make dynamic app pages across mobile and desktop. “We’ve added new page types that you can view dynamically,” Michael says.

Optimize your life (and your app).

Another thing that might fly under the radar is Optimizer for Lightning Apps, which can help you make your app work better. A big piece of feedback Michael and his team got was, “The App Builder is great, but we want to make sure that we’re designing our pages for the best experience for the end users.” That’s what lead them to further develop Optimizer. This feature is pilot for now, but you can reach out to your account team to get it enabled.

Optimizer for Lightning Apps lets you run a report that analyzes your custom record pages. It looks at the components that are laid out on the page make some suggestions to increase performance and effectiveness. If you have a bunch of components on a page, it might recommend that you put some of them behind a tab. As Michael says, “A hidden trick about the tabs component is that only the active tab loads the component, so it makes your page experience load a little bit faster.”

Resources

• App Builder enhancements in the Spring ‘18 Release notes
• Trailhead: Spring ’18 Release Highlights

Social

• Michael on the Trailblazer Community
• Gillian: @gilliankbruce
• Salesforce Admins: @salesforceadmns

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