Tuesday, August 22, 2017

Quick Highlights of the Winter ’18 Features

Innovation | Artificial intelligence (AI) | Salesforce Einstein | Lightning


As we all know Salesforce announce Seasonal Releases three times a year. Each release comes up with large number of new and enhanced features. Salesforce Winter '18 features are now publicly available. As per Salesforce Winter '18 Release documentation most of the new features can be outdated or unavailable during release preview.

New Look and Feel in Lightning Experience

With Winter '18 release, Salesforce has improved readability, information density, and color contrast in Lightning Experience. These refinements are now built-in. In a future release, user will be able to define a custom theme.


Themes and Branding


What’s Not Available in Winter ’18 Lightning Experience?

Please review each feature here to analyse functionalities which are currently not available in Lightning Experience.

New Keyboard Shortcuts in Lightning Experience

Winter '18 release has come with new keyboard shortcuts in Lightning Experience.



Initiate the process to Enable Person Accounts from Setup

With Winter '18 release, you can now initiate the automated process checks whether or not your org meets the requirements for using Person Accounts.


Automatically Open Related Records in Lightning Console Apps

With Winter '18 release, you can now configure the navigation rules in Lightning Service Console to open related records when you open an object record (e.g. Account, Contact or Case etc.).

View Hierarchies for Assets

With Winter '18 release, you can now have tree grid view of asset hierarchies.

External Routing Implementation with Omni-Channel (Beta)

With Winter '18 release, you can now connect Salesforce with an external routing implementation in your routing configuration.

View the Related List by Hovering over a Link

With Winter '18 release, you can view the complete related lists just by hovering over a link.

Encrypt More PII Fields (Generally Available)

With Winter '18 release, you can now encrypt more fields on Leads, Accounts (including Person Accounts) and Contacts.

Wave Analytics is now Einstein Analytics.

Starting in Summer ’17 and continuing in Winter ’18 release Wave Analytics is now Einstein Analytics.

Connect with more Web-based Data Services

With Winter '18 release, in Einstein Analytics you can now even connect with more web-based data services.

Field Service Lightning for Android (Generally Available)

With Winter 18 release, Field Service Lightning app is now generally available for Android.


HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport Security)

With Winter '18 release, you can now set configuration to enable HSTS on communities and Force.com site. It is by default enabled on all Visualforce pages and can’t be disabled.

Verify Access to External Data Source

With Winter '18 release, you can now use Salesforce Connect Validator AppExchange app to quickly verify the connection and external objects data before using it.

Set the API Version of Lightning Components Bundle

With Winter '18 release, you can now set the API version of Lightning Components in Developer Console.

New Lightning Component Library (Beta)

With Winter '18 release, Salesforce has come up with the new component library.

https://<myDomain>.lightning.force.com/componentReference/suite.app


You can also continue to use https://<myDomain>.lightning.force.com/auradocs/reference.app in your org.

Custom Page Template in the Lightning App Builder

With Winter '18 release, you can now create a custom Lightning page template component and make it available as a custom page template in the Lightning App Builder’s new page wizard.

Clone the Existing Lightning Pages

With Winter '18 release, you can now create new Lightning pages by cloning an existing Lightning pages.

Click-to-Dial component in Lightning

With Winter '18 release, you can use the Lightning component lightning:clickToDial in Lightning pages and apps. This is similar to what we have support:clickToDial in Visualforce.

Community Activity with Community 360 (Generally Available)

With Winter '18 release, you can get the valuable insight into customer activity with Community 360 which is now generally available. The Lightning App Builder component that you can add to your console to see a customer’s community activity.

Visual Workflow / Flows in Lightning Community Pages

With Winter '18 release, you can now add Flow component in Lightning Community Builder pages.

Koa and Kokua Templates No Longer Available for New Communities

Starting in Summer ’17 and continuing in Winter ’18 release, Koa and Kokua templates are no longer available for new communities.

Access External Objects using Database.QueryLocator in Batch Apex

With Winter '18 release, you can now use Database.QueryLocator to access external objects from batch Apex.

New @isTest(isParallel=true) annotation in Test Classes

With Winter '18 release, you can now use @isTest(isParallel=true) annotation with test classes to tun in parallel. This annotation overrides the default settings that disable parallel testing.

Deployments Now Recompile of All Apex Code

With Winter '18 release, Now all of an org’s Apex code will be recompiled automatically before completing a metadata deploy, change set, a package install, or a package upgrade (including push upgrades).

Salesforce DX

Salesforce Developer Experience (Salesforce DX) will be generally available in mid-October 2017.

Control Access to Apex REST Services (no longer needed API Enabled permission)

With Winter '18 release, Apex REST Services to create permission sets for users that need to access Apex REST services but not access APIs, like the SOAP API.

Note: Contact Salesforce to enable this permission in your org.

User Interface API (Generally Available)

With Winter '18 release, you can now use Salesforce UI API for native mobile apps and custom web apps to build your own custom apps which users love! This is the same API that Salesforce uses to build Salesforce1 and Lightning Experience.

Second-Generation Packaging (Beta)

With Winter '18 release, Salesforce has come up with new way of develop, distribute and manage agile app development.


Useful Resources