My take on Salesforce Winter 16

It’s just my take/favorites, not covers entire release features –consider as quick bite in Consultants stand point.

Reference: salesforce_Winter16_release_notes.pdf

• Browser – Lightning Experience is supported most recent stable version of Chrome and Firefox, and it requires Internet Explorer 11 as not supported in 10 and lesser versions.
• Lightning Experience – available (within 24 hours of) in Winter 16 release, Lightning Experience doesn’t include every feature available in Salesforce Classic – consider and plan out the roll out strategy if you are moving to Lightning Experience
• This release is prominently focused on Lightning Experience and most part of release notes discuss about what is available and not available in Lightning Experience.
• Exception Handling – we can set email address to alert in case of any unhandled exceptions, previously it used to send to creator of the class by default.
• Enhanced Notes – It comes with auto save feature and ability to tag to multiple (parent) records, it comes in Lightning Experience but will not be available if Chatter is turned off.   
• What is Not available in Lightning Experience wrt List views
• List View – Inline editing
• List View – Sharing with Group
• List View – Following a record
• List View – Cloning list view
• List View with Chart is available, it helps a lot in data visualization
• Sales Path – provides clear separation of functions to focus on fields that matter at that time.
• Opportunity Board – Visual summary of all opportunity, drag and drop to update stage, create task right from the board.
• My Task List – Finally we got this addressed through standard feature with awesome lightning experience
• Salesforce App for Outlook – Get Salesforce content related to emails and events in outlook might help a lot.
• Redesigned Reports & Dashboard home page
• The ultimate, Rich Dashboard Editor – feature of resize, drag and drop feature etc are awesome
• Organization Sync – provides the feature to have second production environment, it can be used while primary application is on scheduled maintenance/upgrades. There are two difference options to control the Metadata sync and user data sync. Also there is a feature to temporarily pause the sync process.
• Email to Case feature available only in Salesforce Classic edition only, so this means if we enable Lightning where email to case already deployed – what is the problem will be faced?
• SOS Video chat and screen sharing – impressive!!
• Search Improvement for communities – will get to see similar topics while typing itself.
• More rollup summary fields – increased to 25 from 10.
• Picklist replacement process – now admin will get notification when picklist replacement is completed in the backend
• Global Picklist – one picklist field can be used across multiple objects. So values in picklist can be easily controlled. But it is now on pilot and available only in developer edition.
• All New Data Import Wizard – one place to import & update standard and custom object records.
• Records with inactive owners can be updated without any problems.
• Lightning Connect – Now external objects are writable which allows bi-directional integration.
• Enabling separate load for External object related list, meaning if Account has external object as related list loading of Account records won’t be get impacted by external object (related list).
• Process Builder – supports time based actions with multiple schedules to perform group of actions.
• New login screen look and feel which goes with Lightning Experience
• Now we can create multiple user account in one go and Login History now included the location of the user login as well.
• Platform Native Encryption – allows to encrypt selected objects and fields.
• Lightning Component is generally available in all Salesforce.com supported platforms like SF1, Classic, Lightning and communities.
• Lightning Components are now available in AppExchange portal.
• Object Manager –one place to manage standard and custom objects.
• Some screen still referring to classic screen even when we are in Lightning. In the lightning Experience – Setup menu, some of the menu just give the feel of classic screen just got included in the Lightning outer layer. Meaning the core pages are in classic feel only. For example when I create flow, the screen when I click “new” button is in classic feel. 

Dreamforce 15 – Key takeaways

This year Dreamforce was huge compare the previous year(s). Of course it is dreaming big year of year.   There is so many to take for everyone from Dreamforce, but for me as a Salesforce.com Developer, Consultant and Architect – it is huge.

However what I possibly took on that four days!

Presented a session in my company Booth on “Global rollout of Salesforce.com using Continuous Integration”.

New Product releases,

Salesforce IQ (RelateIQ) – Sales Cloud for Small Business

SalesforceApp cloud – Platform as a Service

Salesforce.comShield - Platform Encryption, Field Audit Trail, Data Archive & Event Monitoring 

On Heroku Platform,

Heroku flow seems very interesting for Continuous Delivery (especially when I did presentation on Continuous Integration).

Heroku DX – This supports Continuous Delivery by better source control, easier database management, and easy configuration and deployment by clicks.

There were series of sessions based on specific themes, was able to catch up with some of the sessions on these theme based tracks, which intern provided closure platform to connect people who looks for same topics.

Modern Architecture

CIO command center – Analytics

Security

Breakout sessions – below are the list of sessions I attended and clearly some of the sessions are very informative and good learning, some were explicitly sales demos and some were not mapped to correct roles and levels in the agenda builder.

CoE Workshop

Org Merge Best Practices

Large Enterprise Transformation (HP)

Modern Architecture (Theme based tracks)

Enterprise CoE

Single Vs Multi Org Strategy

Global Salesforce deployment – from business perspective

Lightning roadmap: All new Lightning Experience and Platform

Platform Encryption

Admin tools for Managing and Optimizing Data

Usability Testing

Cisco DevNet

Lightning Platform

Very importantly – If I need to say two things which are very much highlighted and attracted most of the crowd are Trailhead and Lightning Platform (Experience & Design System).

Of course it was awesome feeling to be on Dreamboat and nevertheless to say enjoyed the Dreamfest.

For a quick glance of Dreamforce 15 pictures.

DF15 – My top 5 picks - Day 2

Here is my agenda for day 2 at Dreamforce15. Just thought of sharing the details :)

PS: I wish this agenda will remains same but time has to say if able to make it all this sessions. 

DF15 – My top 5 picks - Day 1

It’s time to build Dreamforce agenda; these are my picks from day 1 session. If you are like minded and looking for some advanced developer, architecture and project management oriented sessions these are some of the best picks for your day 1 agenda. 

My Take on Salesforce.com Spring 15

It’s just my take, not covers entire release features –consider as quick bite in Developers and Consultants stand point.

Reference: salesforce_spring15_release_notes.pdf

• Happy to hear IE7 and IE8 will not be supported from Summer 15 onwards
• Salesforce Analytics for iOS – explore all data from mobile device, unfortunately it is not available in Developer edition.  Unlike typical Dashboard it is much more interactive. It can handle outside data as well through data sets (reusable integration).
• Question to Case – it is available in Salesforce org and Community where moderators can create a case from chatter questions; it is very easy, quick and effective.
• Duplicate Management –Easy to setup matching rules and implement duplicate management and it comes with clean error messages and duplicate details. To accomplish this functionality earlier - have been used to create Workflow Field update to update external Id field (which is marked as unique) with set of field value which identifies duplicates.
• Products now having field history tracking (happy for this but hold on Opportunity Products and Campaign still doesn't have this field history tracking).
• Thanks and Skills are free for Sales cloud users, liked Skills more than Thanks along with endorsements (is it LinkedIn influence?) 
• Enhancements to Asset object – includes Tab, Sharing settings and record types (previously it is child object to Account). 
• Knowledge Article - maximum amount of articles per organization is increased from 10,000 to 50,000.
• Accounts, Opportunities and custom object records owned by inactive users can be updated by any users.
• Organisation Sync – Salesforce.com will be available even when the down time of primary org! How wonderful it is!!
• Add records to chatter group - as like files now records also can be added to the Chatter group.  Further only these object records can be added - account, contact, lead, opportunity, contract, campaign, case, and custom object.
• Chatter feeds supports emotions :)
• Search All Setup – now it can search lot more items than earlier, it can search Custom fields and objects, Users, Groups, Profiles, Roles, Workflow – Rules, Email Alerts, Field Updates etc
• Track Data loader logins with Login History – Application will be listed as “DataLoaderPartnerUI” when users connect from Data Loader UI (tool).
• Apex Flex Queue – it can handle 100 batch jobs simultaneously and more importantly order of execution can be managed.
• Quick Deploy – It will help reduce deployment time through change sets by skipping apex test execution at that time of deployment but it has to meet these conditions 1) All components might have been validated in target environment in last 96 hours 2) All apex tests in target org should be passed and code coverage should be at least 75%.
• @testSetup – Create test records once and access them in every test method in the test class. Changes made to the record are each method is local and rollback at the end of the method. Note: If a test setup method calls a non-test method of another class, no code coverage is calculated for the non-test method.