Salesforce Spring’15 Release: Announcements & Expectations

Advent seems to be the happiest times of the year. Fun, excitement, décor, wish-lists, and a lot of hopes – hope for a wonderful year ahead, and of course a pleasing Spring ’15 release from Salesforce for us. The probable release is expected to hit the tech grounds somewhere in February and the social networks are already buzzing with the presumptions of the Spring ’15 release.

The Winter ’15 release has rolled out with some fantastic updates. Let’s take a sneak peek into Winter ’15 release before we take a glance into what Spring ’15 has in store for us:

Salesforce Spring ’15 Announcements: A ‘Hope-Rich’ Advent

Maps

Salesforce serves as a powerful central repository for client information. But data is worthy only if something useful can be done with it. Missing information and typos in addresses is a common database anomaly. What if you get an option of auto-suggest in the form of street maps based on locations in your records? You don’t have to turn to an expensive third party app for this anymore, as maps hold a special place in Spring ’15 release.

This feature offers users the street maps, attained by geocoding technology/existing geographic coordinates, and suggested address values based on partial entries. Salesforce plans to automatically enable this feature with Spring ’15 release, giving users the ability to opt-out; should they desire.

End of Support for the Computer Telephony Integration (CTI)

With Spring ’15 release, Salesforce will be ending support of the CTI Toolkit. Though your telephony partner may continue supporting the CTI Toolkit, support for technical or product issues will no longer be provided.

The CTI Toolkit provides you with all of the source code, libraries, and files you need to develop your own custom CTI adapter. This is a desktop application and Salesforce plans to develop an Open CTI – a cloud-based solution that allows partners to create robust, customizable, web-based telephony integrations. Contact your telephony partners to begin migrating to the Open CTI.

Dupe Alerts

Currently in beta, Dupe Alerts automatically give warning message when you are entering a duplicate account or contact. You can add the “Find Duplicates” function from “Leads” to the Account and Contact pages. This feature will be fully available in the Spring ’15 release.

Salesforce Lightning

• Lightning App Builder: Build beautiful custom user interfaces for Force.com mobile friendly applications.
• Lightning Components: Integrate pre-built functionalities into Salesforce apps using a simple drag-and-drop paradigm.
• Lightning Connect: Access data from external sources with point and click ease.
• Lightning Schema Builder: Add custom objects, fields, and relationships to your schema easily.
• Lightning Process Builder: Construct business process flows.
• Lightning Community Builder: Create branded and responsive communities with easy to use tools and templates with built in analytics tools.

Salesforce Lightning can be a game changer in 2015. Most of the Lightning family of products is scheduled to be delivered in the Salesforce Spring ’15 release.

The Good News

Get an early access to Spring ’15 in your Sandbox by testing new customizations and features. The Sandbox Preview window is planned for 9th January’15. So activate your Sandbox beforehand to take part in the instance upgrade. Read more for detailed instructions by Salesforce.

Salesforce Spring ’15 Expectations: Stocking hung for Christmas Spring ‘15!

With Spring ’15 release fast approaching, here is the wish-list for the scheduled
Salesforce update:

Service Cloud

• Ideas Comments to be editable in the Service Cloud Console
• The “Back To Top” link of Case Feed page to work in Service Console
• Live Agent Support with personal chat links for Agents in full version
• Access to unscheduled Reports in Service Console
• Ability to attach CRM Content and Chatter Files directly to a case email

Service Cloud

• Ideas Comments to be editable in the Service Cloud Console
• The “Back To Top” link of Case Feed page to work in Service Console
• Live Agent Support with personal chat links for Agents in full version
• Access to unscheduled Reports in Service Console
• Ability to attach CRM Content and Chatter Files directly to a case email

Communities

• Access to search for users in communities
• Access to Knowledge home for community users
• When a Customer Community user tries to access any Ideas Themes list-views, they should not encounter an Insufficient Privileges message
• Option to link/merge more than one community profile
• Ability for users to get a daily digest of new posts or replies to Chatter Answers in a Community
• Outlook integration for Partner Communities

Chatter

• Ability to Edit a Chatter Post after posting
• Ability to put multiple links and attachments to a single post
• Twitter to Chatter integration – Automatic Chatter posts from Twitter
• Ability to report SPAM on a chatter post
• Ability to convert a Chatter message to a Case
• Ability to filter the list of Groups by Membership Type (Private / Public)

Knowledge

• Ability to Edit a Chatter Post after posting
• Spell check on Knowledge Articles
• Workflow Rules and Email alerts for Knowledge updates
• Add Knowledge Articles to Salesforce1 to pull full details
• Ability to mass upload to Knowledge
• Ability to attach more than one file

Analytics & Reports Dashboards

• Allow more than 3 columns in dashboards
• Dashboard filter labels and choices
• More robust functionality and ease-of-use in Analytics as a whole

A wish-list is never over! Add on your expectations from the Spring ’15 release in the comments below. Santa might just pick up yours!

We Grant Wishes!

We at Grazitti Interactive^TM can do it all for you when it comes to Salesforce – Service Cloud, Community Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Sales Cloud, and Analytics Cloud. Our certified developers, agile processes and adherence to customer needs has helped companies like Marketo, Alteryx, Lancope, Ping Identity, Centrify, Ooyala and more, maximize their Salesforce investments. Reach out to us to let your Salesforce worries and expectations are ours this Christmas and upcoming year; and you, just enjoy your holidays!