Salesforce Spring 15 for Banking

With over three hundred pages in the release notes, it is nice to get a break down now and again with a focus on a certain industry. In this, one of many, Spring 15 release notes posts, I am going to focus on things that would excite the banking crowd.

For the purposed of this post, I will try not to re-mention the ones that have been called out in the past such as duplicate blocking, middle name fields or inline Google maps even though these will be welcomed with open arms to all bankers.

Track Data Loader Logins with Login History

This isn't the most sexy of all new Salesforce features but something I hear come up now and again, which is that for banking security and compliance they want to be able to track users using the Data Loader. Asked and answered. Track away.

Create or Edit Records Owned by Inactive Users

The larger the bank implementation the more chance the users are coming and going and with that comes the problems of what to do with data owned by inactive users. Now in Spring 15 the inactive user doesn't have to be reactivated in order to have records updated. The time savings on this one will be huge. More importantly, you can also assign a record to an inactive user which is great when doing integrations from banking cores which might be slow to update old data ownership.

Report on Chatter Usage with the Salesforce Chatter Dashboards Package

The mysterious use of Chatter will now be brought to light as a "post Spring 15 release" AppExchange package which will allow for more detailed reporting on what is going on in the world of Chatter. Of course, you could have been using Compliance Locker (LINK) to track chatter posts, deletions and files, but you already knew that.

Convert Leads to Contacts on Salesforce1 Mobile (Beta)

One of the big gaps in Salesforce1 Mobile was the very basic function of converting a Lead. No longer will bankers have to wait to get back to their branches to convert the lead and update the pipeline. Of course, Forecasts is still the other big missing feature, but here is to hoping for Summer 15. #SafeHarbor

Retain Field History with Field Audit Trail (Generally Available)

The last feature to mention is a little bit of giving and a little bit of taking away. A new pay feature for retaining field history for up to 10 years is going to "extend" the included field history tracking. The old feature, which you know and love, will now have a shelf life in terms of how long it is kept, but with more fields to track. This is one of those features where digging deep into the implementation guide (and getting some pricing) would be a highly suggested course of action.

Do you have some favorite Spring 15 features that the banking industry will just go bonkers for? Share them with me in the Success Community, on our Facebook page, in comments below or directly at me @JasonMAtwood.