PLATFORM UPDATES

1. Personalize Navigation Bar

Personalize an app’s navigation bar to suit the unique way you work. You can reorder items, and rename or remove items that you’ve added. Personalized navigation in Lightning Experience is similar to customized tab sets in Salesforce Classic but better. In Lightning Experience, the navigation bar can contain more than just object-level items, like Accounts. You can add granular items, like a dashboard, list, or record.

Temporary Tabs

Use temporary tabs to access important items directly from the navigation bar. For example, open a frequently used dashboard in a temporary tab to access it instantly from anywhere.

Temporary tabs are also a great way to manage items that aren’t in your current app. For example, let’s say you open an item from the App Launcher, from your favorites list, or from a link. If it’s not already accessible from the navigation bar, the item opens as a temporary tab where it’s in easy reach.

The asterisk next to the item means it’s a temporary tab. Temporary tabs are removed from the navigation bar when you close them, log out of Salesforce, or switch to a different app. But you can permanently add them to the navigation bar.

Make a temporary tab a permanent part of Navigation Bar

Open the item as a temporary tab, and select Add to Nav Bar from the dropdown menu.

A navigation bar can have up to 50 items, which includes the default items. If a navigation bar already has 50 default items, you can’t add more.

2. Themes and Branding

You can choose one of Salesforce’s built-in themes or create your own custom themes with just a few clicks. From Setup, enter Themes and Branding in the Quick Find box, then select Themes and Branding. You can view, preview, and activate an existing theme or click New Theme to create your own.

Upload a brand image, and choose brand colors. Optionally, upload a page background image, default banners, and avatars for groups and user profiles.

Only one theme can be active at a time, and a theme applies to your entire org. You can also choose whether to use an app’s brand image and navigation bar color instead of a custom theme’s brand image and navigation bar color when using the app. To enable this override, navigate to the App Manager in Setup. Click for a Lightning app, select Edit, then click App Details & Branding.

Theme and brand-based colors show up in various places in the user interface, including page backgrounds, the global header, navigation bar, tabs, and buttons.

3.  Salesforce Surveys

Introducing Salesforce Surveys! Create beautiful, easy-to-use forms for collecting feedback and data from your users or customers. Add different types of questions to gather the data you need. All your valuable survey data is stored in your org, so you can harness the power of Salesforce to view data, create reports and dashboards, and share insights with your company.

Salesforce Surveys is available by default in Developer, Enterprise, Performance, and Unlimited editions with Health Cloud.

Salesforce Surveys is available for an additional fee in Developer, Enterprise, Performance, and Unlimited editions without Health Cloud.

4. Deactivate Orgs You Don’t Use

When an org has outlived its usefulness and it’s time to move on, you can deactivate it. When you deactivate an org, you have 30 days to change your mind and reactivate it. After 30 days, the org is locked, and you must contact Salesforce Customer Support to reactivate it. After 60 days, the org is permanently deleted from Salesforce servers.

From Setup, you can deactivate an org from the Company Information page.

If the org has released a managed package, you can’t deactivate it.

5. Introducing Flow Components

• Build flow screens using Lightning Components
  • The world of lightning components has reached lightning flow.The use a component inside a flow it needs to implement the new lightning:availableForFlowScreens interface and should have a corresponding design attribute.

• • Override the default Header and Footer on flow screens

• Now we can remove the default header and customize the navigation buttons at the bottom. It only works for Lightning flow runtime.To remove the header and footer, deselect Show Header and Show Footer when you configure a flow screen. If you remove the footer, the screen’s navigation buttons don’t appear. Make sure to add a custom Lightning component that lets users navigate from the screen to another one.

• • Track Progress Through a Flow with Stages (Beta)

• Indicate a user’s point in the flow using the new stage resource and two new system variables: {!$Flow.ActiveStages} and {!$Flow.CurrentStage}. For example, indicate where in a purchasing flow the user is with breadcrumbs or a progress indicator. This feature is new in both Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic.

• $Flow.ActiveStages identifies the stages that are relevant to the flow’s current path.
• $Flow.CurrentStage identifies at which stage the flow is. Make sure that the selected stage is included in $Flow.ActiveStages.

• Call JavaScript Directly from Your Flow with Local Actions (Pilot)
  • Pull data from an on-premises or private cloud database directly into your flow without going through the Salesforce server. Or do things directly in the browser, such as open a particular URL or confirm that a record was created with a toast message. With flow local actions, you can call the JavaScript controller of an associated Lightning component, which means you can integrate directly with the browser. This feature is new in both Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic. However, it’s supported only in Lightning flow runtime.

• • Upload Files Directly from a Flow

• With just a few clicks, your users can attach files during a flow. Just add the File Upload component to your flow screens using a Lightning component field. This feature is new in Lightning Experience. However, it works only for flows that use Lightning runtime.

To add the File Upload component to a flow screen, add a Lightning component field to the screen. For Lightning Component, select forceContent:fileUpload. Then configure the attributes.

6. Execute All Autolaunched Flow Interviews When Invoked in Bulk (Critical Update)

When flow interviews are invoked in bulk, they are now all executed. Previously, when multiple flow interviews were invoked in bulk, only the first interview was started and executed; the remaining interviews were discarded.

You can invoke multiple interviews for an autolaunched flow simultaneously by:

• Uploading bulk records that start a process, which then executes a flow action.
• Passing multiple input maps in the request for the Invocable Actions resource in the REST API

Because the interviews run in one transaction, your process or API call could hit limits that it wasn’t reaching before, such as Maximum number of duplicated updates in one batch. If more than 12 duplicate updates are tried, the entire transaction is rolled back. If your implementation hits a limit, the flow error email includes error messages for that limit.

 

Sales Cloud

1. Sales Cloud Einstein: A Smarter Sales Process at Every Step

With the Einstein Readiness Assessor, it’s now easier to see whether you’re ready to start using Sales Cloud Einstein. And, if not, what steps to take. This change applies to Lightning Experience only.

Sales Cloud product suite is expanded with Einstein Opportunity Scoring. Now we can priortize our way to more business.

• Prioritize Your Way to More Business (Generally Available)
  • Let artificial intelligence help you and your team prioritize opportunities so that you can close more deals. This feature is new in Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic. Opportunity scores are based on the record details, history, and related activities of the opportunity and related account. Information about the opportunity’s owner, such as yearly win rates, is also used to calculate the score.

• Einstein Forecasting: Intelligent Predictions About Your Sales Teams (Beta)
  • Let Einstein take the guesswork out of forecasting. Use artificial intelligence to get more certainty and visibility into how your sales teams are doing. This feature is new in both Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic.
  • Einstein improves your forecasting accuracy with predictions about your sales team’s opportunities based on past data. In Lightning Experience, see key performance indicators (KPIs), helpful forecasting graphs, and up-to-date metrics that are refreshed multiple times a day. In Salesforce Classic, stay on top of your team’s forecast predictions with weekly reports. This feature is new in both Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic.

2. Leads: LinkedIn Integration and Conversion Configurability

Automatically add leads to Salesforce from LinkedIn Lead Gen advertisements. When prospective customers fill out a form on your LinkedIn ad, we convert the data directly to new Salesforce leads. This feature is new in both Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic.

Assign the new leads to the user or queue you choose. You can add up to 500 leads from LinkedIn per day. If the number of leads you get in a day exceeds the limit, we email the additional leads to the default lead creator you designate in Setup.

Setting up the connection is simple.

• Connect a LinkedIn account (1) to your Salesforce org. From Setup, enter LinkedIn Lead Gen in the Quick Find box. Then click LinkedIn Accounts. Log in to LinkedIn with the member account you plan to use for managing lead generation. The member account can be either a Campaign Manager or Account Manager with the Lead Gen Form Manager permission or a Company Page Admin.

Salesforce connects the ad accounts associated with this member account to your org (2). All forms associated with these ad accounts generate leads in Salesforce. If a rep adds an ad account, be sure that they inform you. To connect the new ad account to Salesforce, click Refresh Accounts.

• Set up default values for leads from LinkedIn. From Setup, enter LinkedIn Lead Gen in the Quick Find box. Then click Lead Gen Fields.

• Map LinkedIn form metadata fields to lead fields. This metadata provides information about the form that the lead comes from. Usually, you use custom lead fields for this data. Consider using a specific Lead Source value for leads from LinkedIn. Your marketing team can use the form metadata when analyzing campaign effectiveness.

• Map LinkedIn lead fields to Salesforce lead fields. Mapped fields must share the same data type.

• Set up more Salesforce lead fields to capture data from your LinkedIn custom form questions. Use a lead field for each question and another for the answer provided by the lead. This way you can report on questions and answers by filtering leads by questions asked.

• To confirm your choices and begin receiving leads, click Save. No leads come to Salesforce until you save your field mappings.

 

3. Analytics: Reports and Dashboards and Einstein Analytics:

The second beta release of the Lightning Experience report builder lets you categorize report data with buckets, include or exclude results from related objects with cross filters, and summarize data in new ways with summary formula columns. These changes apply to Lightning Experience only.

• Categorize Data with Bucket Columns:

Quickly categorize report records without creating a formula or a custom field by bucketing them. When you create a bucket column, you define multiple categories (buckets) used to group report values. Like any other column in your report, you can sort, filter, and group by bucket columns. This feature is new in Lightning Experience.

• Filter Across Objects with Cross Filters:

Include or exclude records in your report results based on related objects and their fields. This feature is new in Lightning Experience. To see which accounts have escalated cases, add a cross filter. Set the cross filter to show accounts with cases that have status equals escalated.

• Filter by Role Hierarchy :

Previously, in Lightning Experience, you could filter by role hierarchy while viewing a report, but not while editing. Now, in the Lightning Experience report builder, you can filter by role hierarchy. This feature is new in Lightning Experience. To filter by role hierarchy, first edit a report. Then, from FILTERS, click Show Me and filter by role.

4. Lightning Experience Report Builder Feature Differences and Gaps

• In the Salesforce Classic report builder, you must choose a report format before grouping data. In the Lightning report builder, the report format automatically updates as you group report data. Tabular, summary, and matrix reports are all available, but you don’t select the format before grouping the data.
• The Lightning Experience report builder features the same charts as the report-view-page in Lightning Experience.
• In the Lightning Experience When grouping records by a date field, you can’t customize date granularity. For example, on the Opportunity report type, grouping by the Date Closed field always groups records by day, and Month Closed always groups records by month.

Community Updates

Communities get an even jauntier spring to its step with an abundance of cool features. The Community Cloud is better integrated with the Marketing Cloud with two new features. Partner communities can now take advantage of distributed marketing, which allows partners to use preconfigured customizable campaigns when marketing new programs.

1. Einstein Answers

When your customers come looking for answers in your community, they want accurate results that solve their issues quickly. Einstein Answers is here to help. When a community member asks a question, Einstein Answers looks through articles and past discussions in your community. After sifting through your community’s data, Einstein Answers suggests answers to the community member’s question. Power users, known as Answer Champions, review and rate the suggested answers and post good ones to the community.

2. Market to Your Members with Journey Builder for Communities

Community Cloud and Marketing Cloud Integration we introduced as a beta feature in Winter ’18 is now generally available. With Journey Builder, you can create customer journeys across email, mobile, ads, and the web. With the Community Cloud integration, community and marketing managers can place community members on rich customer journeys, boosting engagement and driving activity in the community. You must have both Community and Marketing Cloud licenses to use this feature.

3. Keep Track of Events with Community Calendars

Access Salesforce calendars from your Lightning community, and share your calendar with others. Use the new Calendar component to view your events and other users’ calendars directly from your community on your desktop or mobile device. You can set up a calendar to show details in the side panel or hide it by default. You can also share your My Events calendars with other team members and add their calendars to your view. 

If you have a Customer Community Plus and Partner Community license, you can create events from the calendar.

4. Gather Feedback from Your Community with the Survey Component

Your community members are a valuable part of your business—and they have valuable opinions. Salesforce Surveys lets you create customized surveys to gather important data from your customers. Tap into your community’s fount of knowledge and experience by embedding custom surveys into community templates with the Survey component. This component is available in Lightning communities and Lightning Bolt solutions.

The Survey component embeds an active survey into any Lightning community template. When your community members log in, they have the option to participate in the survey.

5. Assign Audiences to Page Components

You can now assign most audience criteria to individual components on a page, making it that much easier to get the right content in front of the right members.

Say that you have a page that’s assigned to customers in the U.S., but you want different topics and feeds to appear for customers in California. Go to the page in Builder, and click the component.

Click the arrow next to the component name, and select Assign Audience. You can delete or duplicate a component using the same Dropdown.

6. Create Multilingual Communities in Community Builder

You no longer have to go to Site.com Studio to create multilingual communities. Language controls are available in Community Builder settings.

To add languages, set the default community language, export content, and import translated content, click > Languages.

After you add one or more languages, the language selector appears on the main toolbar so you can switch between languages.

7. Community Analytics: Case Deflection and Sentiment Analysis Dashboards

Two new dashboards show how well your community is deflecting cases and give you a feel for your community’s overall sentiment.

The dashboards are available in the Spring ’18 Community Management Package on the AppExchange, available soon after the release.

Know How Well Your Community Deflects Cases

Get insight into how well the Contact Support Form and Case Deflection components actually deflect cases from being created. Using the Case Deflection Dashboard, get real-time metrics on potential and confirmed case deflections, the most helpful articles and discussions, and the least helpful articles and discussions.

Sentiment Analysis Dashboard (Pilot)

Sentiment Analysis gives feed posts and comments a positive, neutral, or negative sentiment probability score. The score can help you get a feel for what’s going on in your community. We made that information even more useful with a new dashboard.

8. Components: More and Better Components to Accelerate Your Development

Apex Sharing Behavior Basics

Previously, Lightning component controllers that didn’t explicitly set a sharing behavior operated as though with sharing was set. This behavior is the opposite of Apex operating in other contexts, such as Visualforce controllers.When this critical update is enabled, the sharing behavior of Apex code respects the documented behavior and is consistent with Apex code behavior in other contexts. So when you call @AuraEnabled controller methods from Lightning component code, if neither the class nor method explicitly specifies the sharing behavior, the controller method implicitly uses without sharing.

API Access for <lightning:container> Apps Is Revoked (Critical Update)

This critical update removes access to Salesforce APIs from inside the iframe because this access is a security risk. Managed applications have full API access and can modify records not intended to be used by those applications. For example, a to-do list application could view and modify data in unrelated objects, such as Opportunities.

To activate this critical update:

1. From Setup, enter Critical Updates in the Quick Find box, and then select Critical Updates.
2. For API Access for Apps Is Revoked, click Activate.
3. Test the components that previously used API access

<style> Tag Not Allowed in Components

You can’t add a <style> tag in component markup or when you dynamically create a component in JavaScript code. This restriction ensures better component encapsulation and prevents component styling interfering with the styling of another component.

The <style> tag restriction applies to components with API version 42.0 or later.

Find Dynamically Created Components

You can now use cmp.find() to find a component that you create dynamically with $A.createComponent().

In prior releases, a bug prevented cmp.find(), the standard method for finding a component, from working with dynamically created components. This bug has tripped up many people. Now, it just works as you would expect.

 

9. CHATTER ENHANCEMENTS

a.Share Links to Posts

The Share feature in the Chatter publisher now includes a Copy Link option. Use it to grab a link that jumps directly to the detail view of a post. This feature is available in Lightning Experience.

The full link appears in the Copy Link to Thread dialog (1). We took it out of this image to preserve privacy.

Copying places the link on your clipboard. You can paste the link wherever you like. Paste it in the Chatter publisher to see a preview of the post you’re linking to.

b.Apply a persistent filter to your chatter feed

When you apply a filter to a feed, you want it to persist. You don’t want to reset it each time you visit the feed. Group and profile feeds—and almost any other feed where you select a feed filter—now hold on to your filter. The filter for that particular feed stays in place, even when you close your browser or navigate away from the feed. This feature is available in Lightning Experience.

 

Health Cloud : A  data model for Health and Care

Decoupling goals from plans using Flexible Care Plans:Flexible Care Plans segregate goals from problems, so that you can use the Health Cloud data model in a way that reflects your org’s specific approach to a patient’s health problems.

The approach is to customize your planning depending on your use case.Here is an example of different kinds of views you can have while viewing your patient’s health plan.

• Problem view:Clicking on Problems in the Care Plan menu bar presents those problems directly, and links to the goals and tasks associated with that problem.
• Goal View:Goals are the patient objectives that help achieve an improved outcome for a problem. A patient can have as many goals as they need.
• Task View:This is generally for the support staff who want to be in sync with the tasks that a patient’s care plan lays out.

Survey to gather patient information:From within each patient’s care plan, see the list of surveys that are available to send to that patient. With a simple click, the email invitation is on its way to the patient. When the patient clicks the survey link within the email, they can log in to the community and complete the survey.

Track Care Gaps To prioritize health activities:Now Health Cloud helps you prioritize efficiently by surfacing gaps in a patient’s care where your team can make a difference. To close a care gap, you tie it to a support process.

 

Lightning Updates

1. URL Formatting

• New URL Format for Lightning Experience and the Salesforce Mobile App

The current URL format used by Lightning Experience standard apps and the Salesforce mobile app is being changed. The new URL format is more readable and addresses the issue of being directed to an unexpected location when accessing Lightning Experience URLs before authenticating. This update doesn’t apply to console apps and communities.

• What does the new URL format critical update (CRUC) do?

It changes the URL format used by Lightning Experience standard apps and the Salesforce mobile app. For example:

• Currentformat: https://<lightning.domain.com>/one/one.app/#/sObject/Account/home
• New format: https://<lightning.domain.com>/lightning/o/Account/home

The critical update doesn’t apply to console apps and communities.

• When will the new URL format be enforced?

In Spring ‘18, all new orgs will use the new enhanced URL format, and existing orgs can opt-in via the CRUC. Starting in Summer ’18, all orgs will use the new URL format for Lightning Experience standard apps, console apps, and the Salesforce mobile app. Communities won’t be affected.We recommend that you enable this critical update in a sandbox first to test it, and make necessary adjustments before the new URLs go live for everyone.

• What happens to links I’ve saved, or see in email?

Don’t panic! The existing URLs will work for the foreseeable future. Links that you’ve saved or have in emails will be translated into the new enhanced URL format when they’re executed. If you have the enhanced URL format enabled for your org, that format is what you see in the browser address bar.

• How do I enable the new URL format?

In Setup, type Critical into the Quick Find box, then click Critical Updates. Find the row for enabling the new URL format, and click Activate.

2. Lightning Knowledge Enhancements:

Insert Article Content into Case Emails

No cutting. No pasting. No retyping. Agents can insert article content directly into case emails,quickly answering customer questions. This change applies to Lightning Experience.

Set Up Draft Approval in Lightning

As in Classic Knowledge, authors can now submit draft articles and route them for approval.Admins can design a custom approval process based on their organization’s needs, even setup article routing with auto-approval conditions. This change applies to Lightning Experience.

Reassign Drafts to New Assignees

Previously, when a draft article was assigned to someone who left the company or went on vacation, the article was stuck in draft mode and never published—not anymore. Managers and authors can reassign drafts if the owner can’t finish the article (or wandersoff to Bora Bora). This change applies to Lightning Experience only.

3. New Components

The following components are new and require API version 42.0 and later.

a. lightning:carousel (Beta)

A collection of images that are displayed horizontally one at a time.

b. lightning:formattedAddress

Displays a formatted address that provides a link to the given location on Google Maps.

c. lightning:formattedName

Displays a formatted name that can include a salutation and suffix.

d. lightning:formattedTime

Displays a formatted time based on the user’s locale.

e. lightning:inputAddress

Represents an address compound field with support for street, city, province, postal code, and country.

f. lightning:inputField

An editable field with a label, help text, and value that corresponds to a field on a Salesforce object. This component must be nested in a lightning:recordEditForm component.

g. lightning:listView

Represents a list view of records that you own or have read or write access to, and records shared with you.

File Updates

1. Access Files with the View List of Assets

With the View List of Asset Files, you can quickly access all your asset files. Files are listed in order by the date last modified. When you click a file’s Unique Name, the Details page appears, and you can view the file. These changes apply to Lightning Experience, Salesforce Classic, and all versions of the Salesforce app.

To see your list, go to Setup, enter Asset Files in the Quick Find box, and select Asset Files.

2. Allow Standard Users to Create Assets

Any user who has access to Files can now create content assets as long as the user has the View Setup and Configuration user permission. Use the latest version of the API to create content assets. This feature is new in both Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic.

3. Create Asset Files for Unauthenticated Users

You now have a way to provide customers with a way to create asset files that unauthenticated users can access. This feature comes with a dedicated servlet for unauthenticated users to access the Asset file. Make sure to tag assets as publicly accessible. This feature is available in Lightning Experience, Salesforce Classic, and all versions of the Salesforce app.

4. Preview Files on the Go

Whether you’re working on the go or in the office, you can use File Preview to get to your files. File Preview on Mobile gives you access to your files from your mobile phone or tablet. With options to view and download, you can have a seamless experience while you work from the office or from the road. This feature is available in Lightning Experience and Salesforce mobile web.On a desktop, File Preview icons are front and center.

You can also download or view external files in Box, Google Drive, and Quip from Salesforce mobile web. Make sure that the app is installed on your device, you’re logged in to the external data source and the external app, and you have access to the file. And don’t worry—if you’re previewing a Microsoft SharePoint or OneDrive For Business file in Salesforce mobile web, you can download it.

5. Add Library Members with Library Member Management (Beta)

Library Member Management is a new way to add library members from the Files Home tab. You can add multiple members at the same time and set member permissions, such as Admin, Viewer, or Collaborator. This feature is new in Lightning Experience.

6. Set Up Quip for Better Integration with Salesforce

Connect your Salesforce org to Quip with a few simple steps. Quip seamlessly combines your team’s work and communication in a central hub. This feature is available in Lightning Experience, Salesforce Classic, and all versions of the Salesforce app.

Go to Setup, enter Quip in the Quick Find box, and follow the steps.

7. Integrate Quip

Set up Quip to chat and collaborate on documents, spreadsheets, and checklists. This feature is new in both Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic.

Go to Community Workspaces > Guided Setup, and select Quip Integration. Click Guided Setup, and you’re on your way.

8. Skip Triggers and Validation Rules on Asset Files

To help avoid package deployment failure, you can prevent triggers and validation rules from executing on inserts, updates, or deletes related to asset files. This feature is available in Lightning Experience, Salesforce Classic, and all versions of the Salesforce app.

Go to Setup, enter Files in the Quick Find box, and select General Settings. Then select Skip triggers execution and validation rules on asset files.

Salesforce Integrations

Let Users Add WebEx Meetings to Salesforce Events

Salesforce users who also use Cisco WebEx for their meetings can add their personal room or a new meeting to Salesforce events. This change applies to Lightning Experience only.

Users can add a WebEx meeting from the event record page.

To let your users add WebEx meetings to their Salesforce events:

1. Enable WebEx Meetings in Setup. A WebEx site name is required. The WebEx site administrator can provide the site name for your org.
2. Create a permission set for Cisco WebEx users, and assign the permission set to them.
3. Add the component to the event page using the Lightning App Builder.

Users without the WebEx user permission don’t see this component on the page.

Other Updates

1. Einstein Platform Services: Image Recognition

Not a data scientist or machine-learning expert, but still want to integrate AI into your apps? Use the Einstein Platform Services APIs to easily AI-enable your apps with image recognition and natural language processing. Using the Einstein Vision APIs, you can leverage pre-trained classifiers or train your own custom classifiers to solve a vast array of specialized image recognition use cases. With the Einstein Language APIs, you can harness the power of natural language processing to analyze text and infer the sentiment or intent behind that text. Make your apps smarter, and look like a genius at the same time.

• Locate Image Objects with Einstein Object Detection

Train deep-learning models to recognize and count multiple distinct objects within an image using the Einstein Object Detection API. The API identifies objects within an image and provides details, like the size and location of each object. For each object or set of objects identified in an image, the API returns the coordinates for the object’s bounding box and a class label. It also returns the probability of the object matching the class label. Some scenarios for using the Object Detection API include locating logos in images or counting products on shelves.

Einstein Object Detection is part of Einstein Vision, so the calls that you make are similar to the calls for image and multi-label models. But an object detection model is different from a multi-label model. A multi-label model returns the probability that particular objects are in an image. In contrast, an object detection model identifies the location of specific objects within an image.

2. Financial Services Cloud

Users can quickly capture what’s top of mind for their customers, whether it’s retirement savings or a savings account, and see it all on the client profile with the Client Expressed Interests component.

Upload large batch sizes lickety-split with Accelerated Data Loads, our enhancements to bulk uploads. Plus, you can leverage person accounts in Financial Services Cloud.

3. Capture and View Customer Needs with the Client Expressed Interests                           Component

Let’s say a checking account customer is interested in a mortgage. Without re-entering data, it’s quick to capture customer needs with a new standard action on the Client Expressed Interests component. And it’s easy to see all open referrals based on expressed interests on the client profile, as well as the potential value of referrals.

4. Upload Faster with Accelerated Data Loads

Following our enhancements to bulk uploads, it’s a snap to upload large batch sizes using Bulk API or Data Loader for the Individual and Financial Account objects.

And you get fewer row lock errors and better error handling.

5. Leverage Person Accounts for Financial Services Cloud

If you’re an existing Salesforce customer using person accounts, good news! Now you can install Financial Services Cloud without migrating to a new org. If you’re a new Financial Services Cloud customer, you can use either person accounts or the individual object model.

Use person accounts to store customer information in a single record in Financial Services Cloud. Person accounts bring together fields from Account and Contact to provide a completely customisable and simplified user experience. Plus, you get the added benefits of person account capabilities, such as duplicate management, Chatter following, and single-step sharing.

Financial Services Cloud enables the individual object model in new installations and Financial Services Cloud trial org by default. However, it’s easy to enable person accounts with a simple setup step.

Migration from the individual object model to person accounts within an org is not currently supported in Financial Services Cloud.

6. Usability and Other Enhancements to Financial Services Cloud

• Stricter Entity Visibility Option on the Relationship Map

Show or hide relationships on the relationship map based on user permissions to comply with privacy regulations and policies. Enable stricter entity visibility so that only users with at least read access on the Account and Contact records in an Account Contact Relationship see the record in the relationship map.

• Strategic Partner Integration

An Insurance Console app and custom fields for policy term and total premium empower strategic partners and customers to create a customized view of insurance policyholders.

7. Macro Enhancement

Increase Your Efficiency with Quick Text

Why type the same message 20 times when you can insert predefined messages, like greetings, notes, and answers to common questions.You can use quick text on all standard and custom objects in the following supported quick actions: Email, Log a Call, Social, and LiveAgent chats. Previously, quick text was available only in Salesforce Classic. Quick text is enabled by default in Lightning Experience.

The shortcut to use quick text in Lightning Experience isn’t the same as in Salesforce Classic.

• In Lightning Experience, press Ctrl+. on Windows and Cmd+. on macOS.
• In Salesforce Classic, use ;; on both Windows and macOS.

If you used quick text in Salesforce Classic, your messages work in Lightning Experience. To keep things easy for you, we made sure that Lightning Experience inherits the permissions you gave to users in Salesforce Classic to create, read, update, and delete quick text. If you’ve never used quick text before, give your users create, update, and delete permission on quick text.

We recommend that you add the Quick Text item to your app so that your users can track and manage all their quick text in one place.To add it to your app, use the App Manager in Setup.To create quick text, click New on the quick text list view.

Let Macro Do your cumbersome iterative work

Don’t waste your time clicking around and updating records with the same information over and over. Use macros to update most standard and custom object records in all Lightning apps. Previously, macros worked only in console navigation apps on the case, contact,lead, and custom objects. This change applies to Lightning Experience only.

Here’s a macro that’s set up to work with accounts.

8. Salesforce IoT: IoT REST API, New Context UI, IoT Usage Monitoring, and Email Alerts

Use Salesforce IoT Explorer Edition to process events from connected devices in near real time and create meaningful interactions with your customers. Explorer offers built-in integration with Salesforce data and lets you leverage your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) investments in Salesforce. This release includes a new IoT REST API to retrieve and manipulate orchestrations and their related components, and a new user interface for contexts. Also, Salesforce is introducing an IoT usage monitoring page, email alerts, and the ability to export and delete IoT data for data privacy.

9. Cases: Mass Quick Actions, Cases for Path, and Email Enhancements

Salesforce has come up with the capability of Quick Actions where you can run actions on multiple records of Case, Leads, or Custom Objects. Mass quick actions for creating and updating records allows agents to be more efficient.You can also use Path for Cases to determine and customize the Case stages that are important to your organization and provide guidance for Agent success.Enhancements around email that continue to push agent productivity to the forefront.

Mass Quick Actions:Agents can now perform mass quick actions on up to 200 items in a list view for Cases, Leads, and custom objects. Not only is this a huge time saver for agents, but managers will love this because keeping clean data just got much easier.

• From a listview, agents can create or update multiple records to perform daily functions such as updating case comments or updating case status.
• Mass quick actions is available only in Lightning experience for standard and console navigation Apps.
• To enable your agents to use mass quick actions, go to the Search Layout for the appropriate object and edit the List View Search Layout.

Email Enhancements:We have a few enhancements which will make searching and sharing of emails much more easier than it ever was.

• Search for emails is finally added as an enhancements.We now have a global search in lightning for cc Address, Cc Address, From, Address, Subject, Text Body, To Address.And also all custom fields of type text, textarea, long text area, rich text area, email, and phone.
• Additional feature of forwarding mail in Case Feed.In addition, the Reply, Reply All, and Forward buttons are available in the Case Feed, Email Message record home, and Case Email Related List.

Case Path for Lightning Experience: Use Path to set up a flow for Case records, allowing your agents to focus on the most critical Information. With Case Path, you can determine and customize the stages that are important to your organization and provide guidance for agent success. Include details about critical information for each stage of the Case plus tips for establishing and maintaining positive customer relationships, and even links to relevant feeds.

Here is the link for complete Release Document : Salesforce Spring ’18 Release Notes