Summer 16 for Service Productivity

Grab a cold drink because it’s time for hot fun in the summertime with these Summer ‘16 enhancements focused on service. Hopefully you have been following along in our series of posts (Rapid Reaction, Sales, Developers, Financial Services) related to this milestone 50th release and take note, there’s more to come. Here are some highlights selected from over 30 pages of service-related release notes.

Salesforce Console For Service

• Set up Service Cloud Features in a Flash with Launch Pad Templates what? This is a major timesaver and what hopefully indicates an increased focus on templates for other areas of the platform. System admins will be able to rapidly deploy and validate Service Cloud features with a few clicks. This release provides three templates that provide the most popular Service Cloud features, including console configurations with reports and dashboards necessary for a productive service organization.
• Responsive list hovers yes, please. Spring ‘16 introduced tab hovers and now users can display the details of a row in a hover, without having to open the record. Hovers deliver the goods without clicks.

Work Orders, Milestones and Knowledge

• Attach Articles to Work Orders indeed. Work orders and work order line items were introduced in Spring ‘16 and you will now be able to attach Knowledge articles to them to enable users to quickly locate information. “Knowledge has a beginning but no end.” ~Geeta S. Iyengar
• Milestones are now available on work orders as well, allowing you to tie entitlement to work orders and track these important steps within your processes. Entitlement management was previously available just for cases, now you can specify whether an entitlement process can enforce milestones on cases or on work orders through the use of a new Entitlement Process Type field.
• Improve Article Suggestions on Cases will allow you to choose five case fields that will be used to suggest articles when closing cases. The concept here is that a search will suggest articles based on their content and any links between similar cases. The suggested articles are available in the Salesforce Console for Service and your portals when viewing existing cases and creating new ones.
• Management of work order hierarchies was enhanced with a couple of fields that make it easier for you to view and build out hierarchies of work orders and work order line items. The new read-only field Root Work Order lists the top-level work order in a hierarchy of work orders and can be added to work order page layouts to provide users a complete view of work order hierarchies. Similarly, the new Root Work Order Line Item field lists the top-level line item in the work order line item hierarchy allowing user to navigate the hierarchy.

This list is not exhaustive of all the service features in this monumental release and I suggest you peruse the release notes to view them all.  Do you have some favorites that we didn’t mention? Please feel free to comment below, on the Salesforce Success Community, on our Facebook page, or directly at me on Twitter @sfdcclicks.