11 Salesforce Winter ’17 Features You Should Know About

The Winter ‘17 release is (almost) here and there are a lot of features for Salesforce Admins to be excited about. Winter ‘17 is also packed with favorite Salesforce Classic features now available in Lightning Experience.

This release will have something to offer everyone—Salesforce Admins, Developers, and Users—so let’s dive into 11 exciting features we’re anticipating most.

Lightning Experience Features You’ll Find Electrifying

The Lightning Experience will see some powerful enhancements and features with the release of Winter ‘17. Some of the features and enhancements will be available within 24 hours after the release, otherwise, you won’t have to wait.

Six enhancements to the Lightning Experience that are garnering a lot of attention and you should probably be aware of include:

  1. Create Custom Apps in Lightning Experience and Navigate More Efficiently. Salesforce has reimagined Lightning Experience navigation to make your users more efficient and allow them to switch between apps that you can brand and customize. The updated navigation mode is like Salesforce Classic, but better.
  2. Troubleshoot Record Errors Quickly and Easily in Lightning Experience. Now, when users edit records inline and an error occurs, the fields containing the errors will appear in a popup at the bottom for easy scanning. Fields are linked in the popup so you can easily navigate to them and fix them quickly.
  3. Get the Scoop on a Company’s Top Leaders. Account records now give sales reps easy access to the latest news about a company’s top executives because it’s not enough to know who’s who at a company anymore. You also need to know who’s been up to what.
  4. Add Quotes to Opportunities in Lightning Experience. Now you can take advantage of quotes in Lightning Experience to show customers the prices of the services or products your company offers. Sales reps will have the ability to create and edit quotes, quote line items, and save quotes as PDFs.
  5. Lightning Voice. Lightning Voice gets several new features in the Winter ‘17 release including new ways to make calls and call forwarding.
  6. Google Integration (Beta). Encouraging sales reps to set up Google Calendar events to sync to Salesforce will increase their productivity because they’ll no longer have to maintain events in two separate applications. It can also increase Salesforce adoption rates within your organization.

Chatter Enhancements You Should Be Excited About

Chatter (as part of the Lightning Experience) got a little love in Salesforce Winter ‘17 too. All of the features in the release notes are worth mentioning but it’s  420+ pages worth of information.  So here’s a few favorites we narrowed down and thought it’d be fun to shout about:

  • Group Feeds Are Now Live! Yay! Real-time group feeds! You won’t have to refresh the page anymore to see what people are saying exactly as they say it. Each new post will be highlighted briefly to make sure you’re aware of it.
  • Comments Are Now Live! Clearly, there’s a theme here. Again, no more page refreshing required to see comments; you get to see them as they happen. Comments also refresh and stay live after you subscribe to them.
  • Edit Feed Posts and Comments in More Places. We’ve been patient and now Salesforce is rewarding us. You can officially edit feed posts and comments in Lightning Experience. Enjoy!  

Admin Features You’ll Love

There are a ton of exciting features for Admins coming in this release (we already mentioned one, Google Integration) but there are two more we want to talk about:

  • Picklists! Picklists are an Admin’s best friend when it comes to creating easy methods of data input and managing data quality. Both of these things get a functionality boost in this release.

    Global picklists are now available in Lightning Experience (and Salesforce Classic). You can create a global value set of picklist values and use it for new picklist fields on standard or multiple custom objects. This will save a lot of time.
  • Assign a Custom Record Page to Lightning Apps. Activating a custom record page in the Lightning App Builder now gives you two options: Make the record page default for all your users or assign the record page to one or more Lightning apps to give users access to a page customized for the app.

    This is a huge win for Admins. You can learn more about Lightning App Builder in the Success Community Group.

Make sure you check out the Salesforce Winter ‘17 Release Notes to learn more about these electrifying Lightning Experience enhancements and features.