What's New in Winter '17?

Winter '17 is here and as usual it's packed with new features - 466 pages of release notes worth in this case! Most of the development has gone into improving the Lightning experience.

I find train journeys are the perfect time to peruse the release notes. Here are the things that I spotted during my travels that I think will be the most useful to customers using mainly out of the box sales cloud functionality:

New Navigation in Lightning
Gone are the icons down the left, replaced with a tab style navigation bar along the top. Each tab has a drop down where you can access recent records. I really like it as you have actual words rather than icons, which is particularly helpful when you have a number of custom objects, you can get to records directly from the tab and it will ease the transition to Lightning for existing Classic users who will be more familiar with the style of the new Lightning interface than the previous one.

Field Level Help
Help popups that Classic users are used to when you hover over the '?' next to a field now appear in Lightning Experience.

Create Multiple Records More Quickly in Lightning
Lightning users now get a 'Save & New' button whenever they create, edit or clone a record.

Record Details Remembers if a Section is Collapsed in Lightning
If you expand or collapse a section in Lightning on the record details, it will stay that way even after navigating to other objects.

Account Hierarchy
Still no Account Hierarchy in Lightning but there is a free AppExchange package for it.

Duplicate Leads
Potential duplicates are identified when viewing a Lead in Lightning so that the sales person can be made aware of this and merge the duplicates.

Quotes comes to Lightning
At last! Now we can add Quotes and Quote Line Items and saves Quotes as PDFs in Lightning.

Lightning Voice
Make calls from within Salesforce - but only to the US and Canada for now.

Inline Editing in Lightning List Views
Now you can edit inline in list views in Lightning, just as in Classic. Only one reord can be edited but the change can be applied to multiple records (beta in this release).
You can’t edit inline in a Lightning list view if:
• The list view contains more than one record type (same as in Classic).
• The list view uses filter logic that contains OR clauses.
• The list view contains lookup or dependent picklist fields.

Kanban View
This card style view that makes managing Opportunities so much easier is now available for Leads, Contracts and Campaigns. Also, you can edit and delete records directly from the Kanban view.

Security Updates
Remember that Salesforce is disabling TLS 1.0 encryption protocol by March 2017. What this means is that if your users use Salesforce for Outlook, they must be on version 3.0 or later and if they use Data Loader they must be on version xxx by that time.

New Changeset Component
Global Value Set - Now you can deploy a global picklist value set, which is the set of shared values that custom picklist fields can use, as a Changeset component.

As mentioned at the start, most of the development is on Lightning features. If you've not tried Lightning yet, give it a go, you might find that it now does enough of the things that you're used to and the modern, new interface boosts users interest and you see an improvement in adoption!

The full release notes can be accessed here:
https://resources.docs.salesforce.com/204/latest/en-us/sfdc/pdf/salesforce_winter17_release_notes.pd...