Salesforce® Winter ’21 Release has arrived. Here’s some quick information on the Release and highlights in review that caught our attention.
Exciting Highlights
New email builder
Salesforce is extending email functionlity in Winter ‘21. Users now can build email templates with a WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) Builder. Using the familiar Lightning App Builder style screen, Salesforce provides a major boost in the email creation department.
additional email enhancements
Salesforce has increased the ability to send or receive larger emails (an increase in size from 25MB to 35MB).
Schedule when to send list emails.
Enable Bounce Processing, receive Bounce Alerts for both Contacts and Leads sharing the same email address.
Einstein Lead and Opportunity Scoring
Einstein is here to help you with Lead and Opportunity Scoring. Einstein Lead Scoring used to require 1000 new leads and 120 lead conversions to start scoring your leads, now you can turn it on instantly.
Einstein Opportunity Scoring used to be a paid feature and is now free for all Salesforce customers. How does it work? Every 10 days, Einstein will analyze your data to model data and provide insights into your opportunity. Einstein uses artificial intelligence to analyse your past opportunities to calculate each score.
Highlight Panels increase Field Display Count
Previously, Salesforce could only show five (5) Fields from the compact page layout. With Winter ‘21, Admins can display the the first seven (7) Fields in a Highlights Panel on a Record Page.
Opportunity List Views
Opportunity List views, in Lightning, now allows users to see if Opportunity amounts or close dates have been changed. Sales Managers now can stay updated on the movement of deals. Managers can now update sales stages from the Forecasting tab.
Opportunity Enhancements
In the Kanban View (Unlimited Edition), a user can easily identify Amount and Close Date changes in an Opportunity within the last seven (7) days. Green text and arrows will indicate amounts that increased and closed dates that were changed. When hovering over an arrow, users can see what changes were made, who made the changes, and when.
Flow Updates
To all you flow geeks out there, this release is a big one. As Salesforce seems to be moving away from updating any other automation tool, you can count on Flow to get even more powerful than it currently is. This release includes Flows that can now handle deletions, debug flows as a specific user, auto flow layouts, and much much more
Dynamic Forms & Actions
These two incredibly powerful tools allow a level of customisation unheard of before the Summer ’20 release. Dynamic forms allow you to create mini-page layouts that can be placed anywhere using the Lightning App Builder, these can be hidden on a per-user basis as well. In a similar fashion, Dynamic Actions allow you to show/hide actions based on the user viewing the page, for a cleaner user experience.
Dynamic Forms is the next step in the evolution of Lightning record pages. It adds the ability to configure record detail fields and sections inside the Lightning App Builder. This feature, which is now generally available and enabled for everyone, includes some changes since the beta release.
These two mega-features are now GA (Generally Available), meaning that they are out of beta and everyone has access to them.
Case Management Enhancements
Salesforce has new Email-to-Case threading behavior, matching incoming emails with their header information instead of through a Ref ID from the subject or body. Note: Existing orgs will get an upgrade path with an end-of-life notification for Ref ID. Another notable enhancement, (Pilot) service representatives can now collaborate with Salesforce and Microsoft Teams; however, you’ll need to contact your Salesforce AE to nominate you into the pilot.
Salesforce Surveys
Salesforce continues to increase the feature and functionality of Salesforce Surveys. Winter ’21 increased Admin ability to create custom journeys by defining which survey page to dynamically include based on survey response. Admins are now able to personalize survey’s emails with Merge Fields with an increased ability to send up to 300 survey participants using the new Connect REST API resource.
Survey invitations sent from the Survey Builder or automated processes will now respect email opt out preferences for contacts and leads.
About Michael Sturgis
Michael is a 6x Salesforce Certified Professional and founder of SCI 360, a Salesforce Registered Consulting Partner. He has been working within the Salesforce ecosystem for more than 15 years with experience in Sales, Implementations/Service Delivery, and Service Support. Michael has over 25 years of professional work experience and has been using Salesforce since 2003. Michael is also a proud member of Vetforce (USMC) and was recognized as one of Salesforce’s top 10 Trailblazer in 2018.