Winter 18 - Let's Talk Lightning
Winter is coming! The Winter 18 Release Notes are out, and Lightning is receiving a lot of love again. This time around, it feels as though the entire release is starting to focus on Lightning. Here are some of my favorite Lightning improvements and additions:
Lightning Experience Gets a New Look and Feel
While Lightning definitely has a much more modern look than its Classic counterpart, it occasionally suffered from having too much going on within a page. This led to a lot of scrolling and some difficulty finding what you were looking for. Salesforce looked to address that in this release. Here is the breakdown of the new UI changes:
More information density and less white space, so you can see more of what you need without scrolling.
Improved legibility (using font size and color) to draw attention to what’s most important.
Better contrast between foreground and background, making it easier to scan and scroll while staying focused on what you need.
You will also have the ability to set the color and background, inspired by Trailhead. For now, you can choose between blue and neutral gray background. In the future, the plan is to give admins the flexibility to create a customized theme to match company branding. I am looking forward to that.
Wrap Text in List Views
Tired of seeing things cut off in your list views? Me too. This is a simple, yet very effective enhancement that I think is going to be well received all across the board. List views can now be edited to have text wrap in their column. This could save folks the time of having to individually click into a record to see key information that is captured in a list view.
This feature is also available when looking through search results.
Get to the Right Record Faster with Enhanced Instant Results
Salesforce search gets smarter with Enhanced Instant Results. Instant Results has always been a feature that I appreciated. Being able to get right to what you are looking for is always nice. Well Instant Results will now recognize misspellings and make spell corrections. Misspelling a word will no longer lead to empty results. Salesforce will recognize a misspelled word and match it with correct spellings of that word.
There are a couple of things to note about Enhanced Search Results. The first is that the spell correction will only work on one misspelled word. When misspelling two or more words, only the first will be corrected. The second is that this feature will only work with Accounts, Contacts, and Opportunities. Maybe we’ll see this feature continue to get built out in future releases? I hope so.
Leads: Speed Through Lead Conversions with Added Flexibility
Lightning Lead Conversion gets a little buff in this release. Salesforce has looked to make its Lead Conversion process more efficient and provide increased flexibility in what you can do.
Along with the new interface, options include:
Create an Account, Contact, and Opportunity from the Lead data with a single click
Update the values provided from the Lead for each new record
Choose the Record Types of the new records
Set up Duplicate Management Rules to match and relate the Lead to existing Account, Contact, and Opportunity records
See the details of the matched records from the Lead conversion screen
Search for more records to relate to the Lead
Create a follow-up task related to that converted Lead
There are going to be a lot of happy Sales Users with this one. That’s a lot of increased flexibility that will lead to increased efficiency, while also limiting duplicate data.
Find Things in Setup Faster with Enhanced Quick Find
As somebody who operates in Setup quite often, I use the Quick Find functionality a lot. Salesforce is taking us a level deeper in Winter 18 by giving us the ability to ‘Search all of Setup’.
Say you know exactly what you are looking to do. You want to edit a certain field on a certain object. In the past, you would have to navigate to the object itself and look for the field. Now, if you happen to know what you are looking for, you can type the name in and select ‘Search all of Setup.’ Boom. You see the field right there. Click on the field and make your edit. This will significantly cut down on the number of steps needed to find and do things via Setup for admins.
What do you think of the Lighting improvements and additions in Winter 18? Want to share your thoughts? Let me know what you think on the Arkus Facebook page, in the comments below, in the Success Community, or to me directly via Twitter at @RyanOwensRPO.
