Salesforce Summer ’18 Release Highlights

The Salesforce Summer ’18 release is quickly approaching, so it’s time to do a recap of my favorite features coming up in the new release. Here are my top 8 picks for the Summer ’18 release including GDPR enhancements to track privacy preferences, enhanced dashboard views, joined reports within Lightning and much more.

1. Get ready for GDPR with these data protection and privacy enhancements

With GDPR going into effect soon, there have been many enhancements to track privacy preferences. This includes a simplified process to merge leads and contacts that have corresponding data privacy records.

You will now be able to permanently scramble data when users no longer want their personal data recognized in Salesforce. For example, a departing sales rep or an external user leaving a community wants Salesforce to stop tracking their personal information. You invoke the System.UserManagement.obfuscateUser Apex method, which permanently scrambles the user’s data and replaces it with random character strings. The user’s detail page remains, but the fields contain meaningless strings of characters.

Learn more about GDPR enhancements →

2. Track time that is not specific to a single date

This feature was a beta release in Spring ’18 and is now generally available with some great improvements. This release includes Lightning UI component support, the ability filter time values for reports without including seconds or milliseconds and the ability to subtract two date fields without resulting in a negative value.

Learn more about tracking time →

3. Enhance your Report and Dashboard View in Lightning Experience

See the information you want at a glance. The Enhanced List View for reports and dashboards helps you zero in on the information that is most useful to you. You can now decide what columns to show, sort or resize and decide how the text in columns will appear. There’s also some new default columns, like Report Last Run Date. You’ll instantly find out which reports have been run most recently and which ones are gathering dust.

Learn more about Enhanced List Views →

4. Joined Reports in the Lightning Experience

Joined reports arrive in Beta within the Lightning Experience. Joined reports are perfect for analyzing Salesforce Data Across multiple report types or getting multiple, simultaneous views of an object.

There are some features that aren’t available yet which will be available in a future release including add to dashboard, save (although save as is available), export and charts.

Learn more about joined reports and what features are available in the beta release →

5. Run Duplicate Jobs on Custom Objects

Duplicate jobs aren’t just for accounts, contacts and leads anymore. You can now run jobs on the custom objects you’ve created. This change applies to Lightning Experience in Performance and Unlimited editions. Field-by-field comparison and merging records aren’t supported yet.

Learn more about duplicate jobs on custom objects →

6. Convert Leads with Contacts to Multiple Accounts

If your business uses Contacts to Multiple Accounts, when sales reps convert a lead to an existing contact, they can now associate the contact with a new or existing account. Sales reps can now expand the Opportunity section of the Convert Lead window by clicking the opportunity name. In Setup, the option Select Don’t Create an Opportunity by Default in Convert Lead Window now works in Salesforce Classic.

Learn more about converting leads with contacts to multiple accounts →

7. Rename your domain when you want

If you have an existing My Domain subdomain, you can now rename it without contacting Salesforce Customer Support. My Domain lets you highlight your brand, so it’s now easier to change it when your company’s name or branding changes.

Learn how to edit your domain→

8. Organizing your Report and Dashboard Folders in Lightning Experience

Organizing your content just got easier! With subfolders, you can quickly create a logical structure for your report and dashboard folders. The organization can be by region, role, or function, or whatever makes the most sense to you.

Moving content between folders is also easier. You don’t have to open the report or dashboard anymore just to change what folder or subfolder it’s in. Just select the Move row-level action for the report or dashboard.

Learn more about organizing folders →