Salesforce Spring 18 Release Notes Rapid Reaction

To start, I feel it is necessary to mention some branding changes, as opposed to an actual feature being delivered. Salesforce is officially all in on the Lightning brand. For example Force.com is now Lightning Platform, so say goodbye to the good old days of Force.com development. My formative years building out Salesforce apps were all done on Force.com, so this is a little sad for me. Now onto the features:

Streamline Lead Conversion without Opportunities

This change applies to Lightning Experience only folks, so if you like the feature and have been waiting for something like this, you’ll have to be in Lightning to utilize it. Have you ever wanted to convert a Lead without creating an Opportunity? I know I have. Lots of times. I’ve worked in many organizations that would really benefit from utilizing Leads, but the conversion process is confusing when it comes to Opportunities, especially if the reason for using Leads is not to track a potential sale, rather to track a potential person for any reason -- recruiting perhaps. With this handy new feature you, as the administrator, can set the default behavior, to either change the checkbox behavior for creation of Opportunity on conversion or choose to hide it altogether. This minor user experience modification opens up a world of new use cases, thanks to being able to control a single checkbox. Thank you for this one, Salesforce!

Keep Track of Events with Community Calendars

Internal users of Salesforce get to create calendars and share them with each other. This feature has existed for a while in Lightning Experience. There was no component for it though, so if you wanted to display data in a calendar format for a community user you, as the administrator or developer, would need to build one. With this feature a calendar can be used and shared within communities (desktop version is the preferred method of accessing it) to share data. Users can also add events to calendars. Pretty nifty stuff.

Connect Your Pardot Campaigns to Salesforce Campaigns (Beta)

This beta feature becomes Pardot’s B2B solution. Pardot literally becomes a native app inside of Salesforce -- in Lightning Edition only -- called B2B Marketing Automation. Once Campaign Alignment is turned on, users can only create campaigns in Salesforce; campaigns in Pardot become inactive and read only. Only connected campaigns work within Pardot. That oddball checkbox user field “Marketing User” is required to use the app; look at that little checkbox continuing to be relevant, even though a permission set license is also required. You can try this out in a Pardot training environment, and you should; contact Salesforce to get a training environment. Users who are familiar with Salesforce as an interface are really going to love this, and in all likelihood adoption of Pardot will see an increase amongst savvy Salesforce users.

Please feel free to comment on the Salesforce Trailblazer Community or directly at me on Twitter @JustEdelstein.