A new year, a new release strategy and the first of the new version is upon us: Release 18A. Let me share what to me are the most exciting enhancements.
Opt in to new features
With the new release strategy also comes a change in how you will experience these changes. Basically … you will not. That is until you opt-in to the changes. This has always been the case, but the way to enable new features has been made a lot simpler. More details here …
User Experience & Analytics Enhancement
As with every new release, the user experience and analytics enhancements are a returning post for each release. With 18A, a few small but not insignificant enhancements will be highlighted in a combined post this time. Not that the analytics changes do not deserve their own post, but the main analytics changes to me are UX changes also for end users. More details here …
BI Composer UX Overhaul
Mentioned in the what’s new overview as ‘Simplified Analytics and Reports pages’, the ‘BI Composer’ got a complete user experience overhaul. As I never dedicated a blog post to the BI Composer, instead of mentioning it amongst the 18A user experience enhancements, I will dedicate a post to giving it the proper introduction it deserves. More details here …
LinkedIn Sales Navigator
As part of a contact profile, Sales Cloud now comes with a LinkedIn Sales Navigator if you have a LinkedIn Sales Navigator license. I do not have one yet, but I hope to share my experiences as soon as I can!
Partner Assessments
Partner Assessments are now a thing ! Not a revolutionary feature, as assessments are available throughout Sales Cloud and Engagement Cloud already, but what it enables us to do is really significant. It allows us to be much more creative in building out a partner onboarding process. More details here …
Service Enhancements
With Engagement Cloud, service functionality was added to Sales Cloud and the changes in 18A are really ramping the service offering up BIG TIME. In what certainly will become a long blog post I will share my impressions on:
- The Digital Customer Service portal enhancements
- The new capabilities in Service Request Management
- The Omnichannel framework and Service Channel changes
Mashup Content
Adding mashup content opens up a lot of new possibilities to enrich detail pages with valuable content, whether is is a report or embedded pages from other solutions or websites. More details here …
Schedule Custom Business Logic & Business Plan Classes
Some of the announced features were already back-ported to last year and have been featured on my blog already. If you want to review them again, you can find them here under a slightly different name:
Looking forward to your impressions and feedback !
