The calendar says  winter, but we’re thinking about spring in terms of the Salesforce releases for that season that you can start testing out now. We selected an even dozen of the releases that should prove particularly helpful for stakeholders and admins broken down into four categories: reports and dashboards, flows, UI, and fields/objects.

4 New Developments in Reports and Dashboards

➣Two More Dashboard Filters

The dashboard filters had been capped at three. Now they’ll extend to five. That should give users a more robust way to view their dashboards without having to resort to workaround. 

Previously, if a business needed a view with more than three filters, it had to create an additional dashboard to serve as fourth (and fifth) filter. Note: this is a beta feature that will only be available in the Lightning Experience in Unlimited Edition. 

      ➣Personalized Filters 

Now you can filter by the current user. That eliminates having to resort to using a custom formula to filter a report for the currently signed in user. This can now be done directly from the filters panel!

➣Subscription Reports

Overview of the new feature:

• Standard reports now include an option to see which reports, dashboards, or other analytics assets users are subscribed to and manage  Lightning reports and dashboards, collections, CRM Analytics lenses, and dashboards in Slack.
•  It also allows you to review conditions for analytics notifications from  dashboard widgets and Einstein Discovery model quality alerts.
• This change applies to Lightning Experience in Group, Essentials, Professional, Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited, and Developer editions.

Learn more about it here. 

➣ Reports & Dashboard Collections 

Now you can add reports and dashboards from various folders to a collection for immediate access in the Unified Home.

Steps to turn on:

1. From Setup, enter Reports in the Quick Find box, and then select Reports and Dashboards Settings. Select Enable the Unified Experience for Analytics Home. 
2. From the App Launcher, select Analytics. In the Collections panel on Unified Home, click + (1).
3. In the New Collection window (2), enter the collection name and optional description.

3  Flow Features

➣Migrate to Flow from Process Builder

This tool had previously only supported migrating Workflow Rules to Flows. Now functionality has been extended for migrating Process Builders (PBs) to Flows, too.  

How to use:

From Setup, in the Quick Find box, enter “Migrate to Flow” and then select it. On the Migrate to Flow page, select the process that you want to convert into a flow, then click “Migrate to Flow.” 

Caveats:

• The migrate tools only support Record-Triggered processes.
• Custom Event PBs, Invocable PBs, or those containing scheduled actions are not supported. 

  ➣Run Screen Flows from Slack

You can now run a screen flow without input parameters using shortcuts or a button in Slack (in beta). Just follow these steps: 

1. In Flow Builder, build a screen flow that includes only screen components supported in Slack. 
2. Add text variables to the flow that are available for input.
3. When you save the flow, select the “Make Available in Slack” checkbox in the  advanced setting of the save the flow dialog box.
4. Finally, activate the flow.

With this feature, you can build an app  that will give users global shortcuts, message shortcuts, or slash commands that invoke flows from Slack.

➣External Data into Flow Builder Without Code

The new feature will be available in Lightning Experience in Enterprise, Unlimited, and Developer editions.

• Before, making callouts to outside systems required code, but now it no longer does!
• With the new HTTP Callout feature in flows, admins can fetch data from auxiliary systems without needing to know how to code.
• If you’re interested in learning more, here’s the link to the release notes for this new feature

3 UI Features

➣View All for Dynamic Related Lists

Single Dynamic Related Lists now have a “View All” button at the bottom. The screenshot below shows old version that lacked this feature:

➣Dynamic Forms for Leads & Cases 

Dynamic forms have been expanded onto the Leads and Cases standard objects!

➣Dynamic Actions for All Standards Objects 

Previously this would only work for Account, Case, Contact, Lead, and Opportunity. Now it has expanded to ALL standard objects!

2 Updates in Fields/Objects

➣Opportunity Product Splits

 Previously, splits were done at Opportunity level. Now splits at the product level will be available in the pilot  phase. (You will have to turn this on from the pilot features page.)

➣Field History for Activities

Stakeholders have long requested this functionality. Now they can turn on a maximum of six fields.

Be aware 

• This activity is normally the biggest data hog on a server, and allowing history will accelerate that data space usage. 
• Be mindful of this and check the storage usage quarterly to ensure a business activity is not going over its allotted space.

 It’s not just the useful  features themselves but the skills of the administrator that enable a business to get the most value out of Salesforce.

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