Winter ’18 Release Overview for Admins

The Salesforce Winter ‘18 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 mass inline edits in List Views, Related List Quick Links, Dynamic Lightning Pages and Calendar Sharing.

If you haven’t already run the Lightning Readiness Check in your production org, now’s the time. It gets a serious promotion in Winter ’18! Do you need help influencing stakeholders and executives to support your move to Lightning Experience? Want to know where your customizations stand as of Winter ’18? Or are you looking for more support to replace Visualforce pages or those old, tired s-controls? Run the Lightning Experience Readiness Check and get the support you need, presented clearly in the updated Readiness Report. These changes apply to both Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic.

Features Your Users Will Love

Lightning Experience gets a splash of color: Based on your feedback, we improved information density, legibility, contrast, and added a splash of color. What changed? More information density and less white space, so you can see more of what you need without scrolling. Improved legibility (using font size and color) to draw attention to what’s most important. Better contrast between foreground and background, making it easier to scan and scroll while staying focused on what you need. We even added color and a background image inspired by Trailhead. It looks great and your users will love it!

Mass Inline Edits in List Views: Users can get more done with fewer clicks when working from list views. Your users can now update up to 200 records without leaving a list view. This feature is new in Lightning Experience.

List View Column Widths Dynamically Adjust:  Users will No longer experience excessive white space in columns or content that is out of view. Columns in list views, search results, related lists, and elsewhere, such as the App Manager in Setup, are now sized based on the length of the data within them. When you resize your screen, the columns adjust accordingly. This feature is disabled when you set a fixed column width. This change applies to Lightning Experience only.

Calendar Sharing: You can share your My Events calendar with your manager or other coworkers, but not with personal and public groups or roles. When you share your calendar, you can control whether coworkers see event details or add events, but you can’t give coworkers full access to edit your events. You can’t share calendars that you’ve created from Salesforce objects.

Emojis in Chatter: Engage your audience by adding zest to your feed. When you post, comment, and add details to your questions, or when you answer questions, the emoji icon appears in the Chatter publisher. Emojis are available in Lightning Experience and Lightning communities.

Features Admins Will Love

Lightning Console Apps: 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

Related List Quick Links: With the Related List Quick Links component, users can view multiple related lists in quick succession just by hovering over a link. And, they can complete actions right from within the hover pane. The Related List Quick Links component is available for record pages only. The component displays two rows of related list links in large or medium page regions and six rows in small regions. Users can view the remaining related list links by clicking Show All, which expands the component. When a user hovers over a related list quick link, the first 10 items in the related list display.

Clone Lightning Pages: Why create the same page over again? Save time and effort by cloning a Lightning page from either the Lightning page list view or from a Lightning page’s detail page.

Dynamic Lightning Pages: Now you can control when a component appears on a record page by adding filter conditions and logic to its properties. No need to add anything to your custom components. It’s all handled by the Lightning App Builder. Component visibility filters are supported for standard components, custom components, and components from AppExchange. If you don’t define a filter, the component displays on the Lightning record page as usual. When you define one or more filters and set the filter logic for a component, the component is hidden until the filter logic criteria are met.

Release Best Practices

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

• Take the Salesforce Release Strategies on Trailhead
• Sign up for a Winter ’18 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

Want More?

Join us September 22nd at 11 am PT for Admin Preview Live!