There has been a lot of buzz in the cyberspace about the much awaited Salesforce Spring ’18 Release. Even though the Salesforce Spring ’18 Release went live in the preview instances, we still have a few days to go for the official release on February 9th, 2018. Though some of the features were anticipated by many, Salesforce has come up with some exciting new features and surprised most of us.
Now, some of the features will affect users features immediately once the release goes live and others would require action by an administrator before the users can leverage the new functionalities.

Here’s a list of some of our favourite features that we are particularly excited about:

1) Personalized Navigation, New Themes, Surveys and Data Protection with Lightning Experience
• Data Protection and Privacy regulations are necessary to keep you and your company’s data private and secure. With various regulations in play, one cannot avoid confusion. Salesforce will give you necessary guidelines to identify which regulations are necessary for you to comply.
• Personalize your app’s navigation to suit your way of working. This new feature in Lightning Experience would allow you to reorder items, remove or rename items and navigate with temporary tabs.
• Another new feature in Lightning Experience would allow you to create custom themes or use Salesforce’s built-in themes with your brand’s images and set of colour codes.
• Additionally, collecting feedback from your customers has never been easier. With a few clicks, you can create custom, easy-to-use forms to send out to your customers. Add relevant questions that you need to gather the necessary data and this data will get stored in your Org. With this data, the insights that you gain is limitless.

2) Salesforce Einstein enhancements
• Opportunity Scoring in Sales Cloud would enable your Sales team to prioritize opportunities and close more deals. Einstein AI will, therefore, help your team focus more on high priority opportunities.
• You must be wondering how Einstein AI would score a lead or opportunity. Worry not! You will be able to see the relevant reasons behind each scoring and understand which fields have a significant effect on the scores.
• Now reps can integrate their email and calendar with Salesforce. With the efficiency of your inbox and Einstein’s Intelligence, your reps can now perform better than ever.

3) Integration of Leads
• Now you can add leads to Salesforce directly from LinkedIn Lead Gen. With a few steps to follow in the setup, you are good to go! Add up to 500 leads per day from LinkedIn and assign these leads to the users or queue.
• With Lightning for Gmail and Lightning for Outlook, your reps can now work on their deals directly from Gmail, Google Calendar and Outlook. Reps will have the flexibility to add records from their emails that don’t match a person in Salesforce.

4) Visualforce and ISVforce
• Want to know whether your pages are ready for the Lightning Experience? Look no further because the Lightning Experience Visualforce Report will give you all the necessary information and recommendations. This will help you to get your pages ready for Lightning Experience. The report will identify your Visualforce pages as overrides, tabs, embedded pages, or dashboard components. It will also provide styling recommendations and next steps to give the look and feel of Lightning Experience to your Visualforce pages. Visualforce pages, when loaded with Lightning apps, will detect whether they’re loaded with console navigation or standard navigation.
• There would now be consistency between the behaviour of global values sets in managed package upgrades and the behaviour of standard value sets for easier maintenance. For data privacy reasons, ISVs can now request Salesforce to delete zip files for old versions of a managed package.

If you would like to know more about what’s in store for the Salesforce Spring ’18 Release, visit here.