One of the first things I look forward to when discovering a new version of any application is finding out how the user experience has changed and oooooh boy, Sales Cloud got a lot of new R13 User Experience Enhancements to discuss !
Homepage Layout Options
When designing the homepage layout, we have a lot more options to choose from. Compare the screenshot in a previous post which shows the traditional homepage design that we knew with the new one in the screenshot below. I can give Sales Cloud now a similar design to my blog !
Wider screens
When using wider screens, layouts will adapt to the screen resolution and if your screens is wide enough, you even have the option to show the sidetab names besides the sidetab icons.
Column Management
For each saved search you define, you now can specify the set of output columns that should be used when displaying the result of a saved search.
In App Composer, an extra set of layouts can be defined so we can control which columns can be chosen on a list layout by each group of users. Do not want your users in China to have a phone number on the list screen although that is allowed anywhere else? No problem at all !
Search
Besides being able to choose the output columns for a saved search as shown above, there are also some new search options to use:
- Additional search operators were added
- An easy way to search on records created or updated by the current user was added
- Rolling Time Filters were added
An additional search feature was also added allowing you to search on related information to an object e.g. we could already search for accounts, opportunities and contacts and now we can also search for opportunities and contacts linked to accounts.
Opportunity Revenue Lines
As the opportunity object is one of the cornerstones of Sales Cloud, the following might not be a true UX change, but I am going to list is here anyway. We have gotten used to find opportunity revenue lines to be listed at the bottom of the opportunity summary page … until now as we can as of Release 13 hide them in App Composer !
Why would you hide them? To make them available in a sidetab instead 😀 and as you can now make them appear in a sidetab, you can search on them too. I can see this very valuable in situations where opportunities come with a lot of revenue lines. For those users with on average only a few revenue lines per opportunity, you probably want to hide this sidetab and keep them displayed at the bottom of the opportunity summary page.
Mass Update
Mass update functionality was already introduced in Release 12. In Release13, Mass Update has been released for more objects and in App Composer, the fields that can be updated through mass update can be defined by role.
… and more
There are some more MAJOR user experience changes coming with R13 also, but those deserve blog posts on their own:
- Tablet Support for the Enterprise Mobile App including Windows Tablets
- Offline read and write on the Enterprise Mobile App
- Outlook 365 support
- Some analytics changes will change the way we navigate in Sales Cloud, as the lines between where the Sales Cloud application stops and Sales Cloud analytics takes over will blur even more
Stay tuned to catch what is these will bring to Sales Cloud
