Summer 18 Release Notes - Reaction
I’ve been writing these release notes reaction posts for about eight years now. I used to call them rapid reactions because they were, ya know, posted shortly after the release notes were published. Now I like to sip them and enjoy them a little before reacting; call it maturity if you will. Here’s my extremely mature reaction to the Salesforce Summer 18 release.
Lightning Heavy
First, a rather obvious observation; I think we need to just start getting used to the fact that Lightning is here, it’s not going anywhere any time soon, and Salesforce Classic is essentially over. If features happen to work in Classic, fantastic, but features certainly are not being designed for Classic any longer. Now, onto the features.
Search Improvements
I’m a complete sucker for search improvements. It is my navigational element of choice when working within Salesforce, and there are a few welcome improvements coming in Summer 18. First off, a user can now search within a specific object using a drop-down next to the global search box allowing someone to drill right in on a specific object. This reminds me of way back before global search existed; way to bring back a feature that was useful in Winter 08. To go a step further, filtering on search results now has far more options. This again brings me back to Winter 08 when advanced search was all the rage. While it seems that these are gap filling features, using them in Lightning Experience should provide a nice productivity boost.
Celebrate Community Members with Recognition Badges (Beta)
The single solitary portion of Work.com making its way to Lightning Experience is doing so in beta and within the Community Cloud first. Finally, there is a “Gamification” tile in the Lightning Community Workspace that allows for custom badges to be created for the community that is being managed. This should help with community engagement and adoption. A little nugget toward the end of this feature announcement is that an enterprising admin can create processes using Process Builder to automatically award badges based on “criteria” (yet to be announced what these would be, but it’s kinda exciting nonetheless).
Show Your Trailhead Badges in Your Profile
Trailhead badges on my user profile - cool! If you’ve already installed and configured Trailhead Tracker then you may have already gotten familiar with this feature, but now it’s baked into the core and relies on the Trailhead Profile. If it’s public then a component that goes on the User Profile page in Lightning Experience will display all badges earned by that user. If the user’s profile is set to private then the component respects that user’s privacy. One flaw here, this data doesn’t seem to be resident within the Salesforce org while the packaged version from Trailhead Tracker is. What does this mean? Well, reports and dashboards come with using the Trailhead Tracker, with this baked in feature the future is unknown in this area…
Lightning Component Library
It’s not often that documentation makes its way into one of these posts, but give credit where credit is due to technical documentation writers, this is good documentation on a tricky subject. Prior to Summer 18 developers writing custom Lightning Components had to jump between the component library and the developer guide on how to build out what is actually displayed in the component library. No more toggling, just use the Component Library which has examples, code snippets, and more documentation about each base Lightning Component, which are the building blocks of all Lighting Experience applications.
Hope you had some fun reading through some of what stood out to me in a jam-packed Summer 18 release of Salesforce. We’ll be diving deeper into these release notes in the coming weeks. Stay in the loop on updates via the Arkus Twitter. Please feel free also to comment on the Salesforce Success Community, or directly at me on Twitter @JustEdelstein.
