The Spring ’19 release of Salesforce is less than a month away. For those of you who haven’t had a chance to browse through the official release notes, here’s a quick rundown of the most important new items for this first update of 2019.

WHAT TO EXPECT FROM THE SPRING '19 RELEASE OF SALESFORCE

Lightning is Coming, Ready or Not

Lightning experience will be enabled on a rolling basis starting in February 2019. No, you won’t be forced to move to Lightning -- yet -- but this is another step towards the permanent deprecation of Classic.  This feature will be auto-enabled beginning in Winter ’20. It’s time to start making serious plans for switching your org to Lightning if you haven’t already. Your team will need to consider the impact on navigation, data access, app availability and more.

If you’re already following best practices by using only custom profiles in your org, and have turned off the Lightning Experience option at the profile level for anyone you know shouldn’t be using it yet, then this item won’t have an immediate effect. If not, it’s time to start following best practices to keep your org healthy, both now and for the switch to Lightning in the future.

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Storage for all orgs is increasing from 1GB to 10GB. This applies to base storage, not per-license storage, meaning that the lowest possible storage allotment for any org will now be 10GB at no increased cost.  This provides additional breathing room for small orgs not ready to increase technology spend. Increased data storage will also benefit those who need heavy customization in order to comfortably move to Lightning.

General Quality of Life Improvements

Spring ‘19 also features some truly game-changing upgrades to Processes and Flows.

1. Processes and Flows are now capable of referencing external objects – in other words, data that lives outside of Salesforce. This allows for tremendous new possibilities for the future of automation in the platform.

2. Cloud Flow Designer is being replaced with Flow Builder. This is great news for admins who disliked the outdated Flash-based UI of Cloud Flow Designer. Flow Builder features an updated HTML5 interface, streamlined flow elements, and sensible naming conventions. As a result, the entire experience of working with this toolset is now far more intuitive and accessible. This is yet another power move by Salesforce towards Lightning, as the new interface for this tool matches the look and feel of other builders within the Lightning platform, such as the Lightning App Builder.

3. Flows can now be triggered on errors— it’s no longer necessary to craft convoluted workarounds to achieve this level of automation. Additionally, Flow screens can now display images and more easily capture address information.

Marketing and Email Updates

If you're marketing to anyone in the EU, GDPR is an important factor for your email marketing and contact database. We recommend reading the entire “Email Experience” section, but here’s the gist of some new features to help you manage your program:

• There’s a new setting available to respect various opt out features, including Opt Out, Don’t Track, and Forget this Individual.

• You can now use the “Send A Non-Commercial Email” permission to allow users to send emails to customers while respecting their marketing email preferences. Users with this permission enabled can now send important messages such as shipping time updates to customers who have opted out of receiving marketing emails.

Gmail integration is more powerful than ever in Spring ‘19, allowing Sales reps to work deals directly from the Gmail application via SSO. Viewing data for synced Google Calendar events also now requires fewer clicks, saving time and hassle for sales reps.

Conversely, Salesforce for Outlook will likely be deprecated soon. Salesforce’s suggestions to switch to cloud-based alternatives to this manual system should be taken seriously.  While SfO is still a powerful tool for desktop integration, and is still being updated with new Salesforce releases, this will not be the case for much longer. If you are still using this platform, now is the time to begin researching alternatives to find the best fit for your team in the future.

Conclusions

The above is just a taste of what Spring ’19 has to offer. As usual, this release packs a massive amount of new material into the Salesforce platform. Both Sales Cloud and Service Cloud are getting some love in this release, and depending on where your focus lies as a business, are worth checking out.  Communities in particular are getting a lot of attention for Spring ’19, and if you use this feature at all, we recommend you review this full section of the release notes.  If you have the time, reading the full text of the release notes is extremely informative. Spring ’19 is proving to be a fresh new start for the year, and we’re looking forward to exploring the changes ahead.

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