Posted by Julianne Boley.
If you’ve ever been to Dreamforce, you know that it can feel a little like drinking from a firehose. There are so many opportunities to learn new things, get hands on experience with new Salesforce.com features, participate in AppExchange product demos, and to network with approximately 170,000 people that are in attendance. It’s exciting and wonderful and completely exhausting.
Every year we expect some of Salesforce.com’s biggest announcements to be made at Dreamforce, after reinforcing of the Safe Harbor, and this year was no exception.
So, without further ado, here are the top three announcements about which I’m most excited (and you should be too):
Lightning Experience
“Lightning Experience is a completely new Salesforce and a completely new way to sell. It’s a re-imagined platform designed to maximize sales rep productivity, complete with analytics and in-line intelligence that will drive sales precision.”
This was by far the most talked about announcement this year and the one that you will notice the most with the Winter ’16 Release. Salesforce.com has dramatically redesigned the user interface and packed it with features to enhance the sales user’s experience. Here is a quick screenshot of what you can expect:
If the thought of change makes you squirm, rest assured that you will not be forced to adapt to the new user interface automatically. It is a toggle on/off feature that Salesforce administrators will control for now.
New features available with the Lightning Experience include:
- Opportunity Board: This handy list view (ish) feature allows you to drag and drop opportunities from stage to stage like digital post-it notes. There seemed to be a lot of excitement around this feature, and we look forward to hearing what our clients think.
- Activity Feed:Imagine the open and completed activities related lists redesigned to look more like your Chatter feed.
- Contextual Hovers:The ability to see everything going on with a customer through hover link pop ups
- Enhanced Dashboard Customization:Many of our clients have been asking for this for a long time. You can finally have more than three columns in your dashboards! The new dashboards interface allows up to 9 columns and looks more modern.
The new Lightning Experience will be available on October 17th.
Salesforce IQ for Sales Cloud
“SalesforceIQ analyzes your inbox and automatically surfaces relevant Sales Cloud data, providing context for all your customer interactions. Get the latest information so you can deliver the right messages at the right time.”
I started using this new application the minute it was announced at Dreamforce! Finally, a Salesforce.com integrated email inbox that prompts you with follow ups and event reminders, provides the ability to collaboratively schedule, and provides a way to integrate Gmail (for those that use Chrome) without the addition of a paid app from the AppExchange.
Here is a screenshot of my inbox (names and email information removed to protect the innocent) with the Salesforce IQ extension enabled:
And these are screenshots from the mobile app that I have on my iPhone:
The Salesforce IQ applications are available now for those of you with a Sales Cloud license. Start taking advantage of this amazing technology!
Salesforce and Microsoft Partnership
“For businesses to thrive, everything needs to work together. Salesforce and Microsoft’s joint integration seamlessly combines the vast resources of the top CRM and productivity app, allowing you to work with more efficiency, intelligence, and collaboration.”
Many of our enterprise and other clients are heavy Microsoft users and the partnership between Salesforce and Microsoft has produced a number of integrations designed to make all of your business processes easier to manage without having to bounce back and forth between applications. The Satya Nadella Keynote included demos of many of these new application features including the Salesforce App for Outlook, Salesforce Files Connect (that allows Sharepoint and Salesforce file syncing) and many integration points with Excel (including the ability to query Salesforce objects from Excel –some of you may remember the old unsupported Excel Connector).
Until Next Time…
I’ve gathered notes and presentation slides and videos to keep me busy learning until the next Dreamforce rolls around and look forward to sharing all of the cool things I can with our clients.
As always, if you have any questions about how to take advantage of any of the new features above, please contact your Buan Consultant.