Salesforce releases updates to its platform three times a year (Spring, Summer, Winter). It seems like the Salesforce Winter ’21 release came out yesterday, but we are already on to the Spring ’21 release.

Salesforce continues to make headway in improving their solutions. This is a key advantage to cloud computing, as Salesforce is able to bring continuous improvements to its platform without burdening the customers with large, complicated upgrades. The platform automatically upgrades behind the scenes, thereby benefitting you with improved performance and functionality. Salesforce also allows users to submit feedback and their own ideas online through Salesforce Ideas. This creates a unified community which allows others to vote for and comment on other ideas which have a chance of being developed and released. Salesforce is proud of their ability to continuously provide improvements multiple times a year.

As a side note, the Salesforce Release Notes have a new home for an improved user experience, updated UI, and search filters. All the enhancements and features listed below might not be generally available and in a preview state, so check out the release notes for the full details.

I have broken down some of my 10 favorite Spring ’21 release highlights below.

1. Manual Sharing

For all the admins out there who are tired of switching back to classic to share records and manage record share, Salesforce is bringing this functionality in Lightning Experience. With sharing, you can manage who the record is shared with and share any associated records. Manual shares are available only for accounts, opportunities, cases, contact, leads, and custom objects.

2. Salesforce Meetings

Salesforce is changing the way Sales reps engage with their prospect and clients. New functionality is coming to make meetings better for everyone. Two new pieces of functionality, Meeting Digest and Meeting Studio, are coming as a preview, so they will not be generally available, but you will be able to try them out as a beta, pilot or preview.

• Meeting Digest – A part of Salesforce Meetings, The Meeting Digest delivers a single page view for Sales Reps before a meeting where they can get insights about who’s attending a meeting, reminders about meeting invitation responses and details, and any related record activity.
  

• Meeting Studio – This tool helps keep prospects and customers engaged during meetings. Reps are able to show their camera and presentation in the same window to keep meetings flowing and bypass any awkward transitions when switching the content to share next.
  

3. In-App Learning

The new Guidance Center provides an in-App learning experience for Salesforce users. Admins are able to utilize public Trailhead modules or myTrailhead modules to create Learning Paths. This tool can be used to enhance internal training programs, curated for your organization’s needs.

4. Salesforce Flow

Salesforce has rebranded The Lightning Flow to Salesforce Flow. This will incorporate all your process and flows. Below is a quick preview or some of the Salesforce Flow enhancements.

• Screen elements now support multiple columns. Admins can now configure screens the make use of winder monitors by adding up to 12 columns to be added to a page.
• The ability to access prior values in a record-triggered flow.
• Time based flow actions are coming so admins can configure flows to execute an action at a particular time. Something that was only previously available through the process builder.
• Rich text emails are coming to flow, some admins will have more control over the way their emails look and feel.

5. Branch Hierarchies

For the Financial Services Cloud, The Branch Management data model lets you define your branch structure and employee and partner assignments. This gives you the opportunity to track activities and performance by branch. You can define branch hierarchies and personnel assignments with the Branch Unit, Business Member, and Banker objects.

6. Einstein Opportunity Scoring

Salesforce has been improving their Einstein Artificial Intelligence platform, now focusing on smaller orgs or those new to the platform. No longer must an org have incredibly large data sets to work from. Previously an org needed at least 2000 closed opportunities to turn on Einstein Opportunity Scoring, but now Einstein takes advantage of a global scoring model that uses anonymous aggregated data to allow everyone to score their opportunities. You can run the Einstein Readiness Assessor from Setup to see whether you are ready to use a global model or a single-customer model for Opportunity scoring.

7. Life Events and Business Milestones on the Go

Organizations who use Financial Services Cloud and users who have the FSC Insurance permission set are now able to use the Life Events or Business Milestones component on mobile devices. No matter where you are, you can capture events or milestones with a few clicks on your mobile device.

8. Lightning Page Performance

As an admin, you can begin to collect better metrics around your Lightning Page Performance. Now get better information on page load time and page behavior predictions using visuals metrics like a gauge and bar graph.

9. Help-Text improvements

The limit has been expanded from 255 to 500 character for field-level help text. This increase applies to both standard and custom fields

10. Opportunity Product Enhancements

Sales teams now have more flexibility to track information on opportunity product records. You can now create a lookup relationship between any standard or custom object and Opportunity Product. In the example Salesforce has given, a rep wants to track two delivery locations in a related list for an opportunity product record.

If you have any questions about the Salesforce Spring ’21 release, please contact our team of experts at any time!