Winter *Insert numerous Game of Thrones puns* 19.

It may only be October, but the ‘Christmas’ countdown has already begun for some people on social media along with so so so many Game of Thrones “Winter is coming” type jokes, and I swear I saw a house putting up his Christmas lights this morning on my walk to the shops and as always Salesforce are no different “Winter 19 is coming!”

General Overview

Previous releases have brought about new features, especially off the back of the Lightning Experience release, but this release seems to be more back to the core essentials, lots of “nice to haves” and maintenance type fixes that people have been asking for, for quite some time.

The full release notes can be found here : https://releasenotes.docs.salesforce.com/en-us/winter19/release-notes/salesforce_release_notes.htm

Internet Explorer News

Now before I move onto some of the key changes, there is one point that comes up a lot with customers that I have spoken to over the last few months and that are the issues some users have, that in all honesty is because they still use Internet Explorer. Salesforce will no longer be supporting Internet Explorer 9 or 10 as of April 2019. They have previously dropped support for all older versions. You can still access Salesforce Classic, Salesforce Tabs and Visualforce Communities using these browsers.

If you have users still on these systems, it is now more then ever a good time to speak to IT about moving from these browsers. Microsoft themselves are not updating these browsers, they pose an inherent security risk and with GDPR a main factor of most companies focus this year, IE joins the list of things that need to be resolved.

Now onto the good things!

Lightning Specific Changes

Searchable List Views

My personal favourite of the release – You can now use a new search bar to search for data in your list views. You can find the new bar next to the List View Controls and works against most of the data on the record and not just those columns in the list view.

New Lightning Users “Welcome Mat”

This was my favourite piece in the release until I saw that I could search List Views (seriously, when you do it a lot it’s amazing how much time that can save) but as a consultant, I’ve been slowly migrating more and more customers onto Lightning, and one of the things we at Hyphen8 do is build Trailhead Mixes specific to our customers to introduce them to Lightning in a targeted manner.

This right here can potentially remove that need for us to introduce Trailhead to all of a company’s users, help them onboard onto Trailhead, get the users registered etc…

When you first log into Lightning you are presented with some useful resources for getting up and running quickly, it’s not always beneficial and couldn’t be customised. Going forward not only can you turn this feature on and off but you can customise the content to make the introductions more targeted.

Display Density

There is a new Lightning Experience display density setting available to your lightning pages, it reduces the amount of white space on a page, and in my opinion will cut down on the amount of scrolling you need to do.

Previously data would appear under the label, in the new version it can appear besides it.

Change Owner to Multiple Leads, Cases or Custom Objects

If you are on the following Lightning Experience in Group, Professional, Enterprise, Performance, and Unlimited editions. This feature is available in Lightning Communities. You can use the Change Owner button on a list view to change the owner of up to 200 records.

All Salesforce

18 Month History Tracking

As of the Winter 19 release, all Field History Tracking on orgs created after June 2011 who have NOT purchased the Field Audit Trail add-on will see their history deleted once it hits the 18 month window.

Previously, Salesforce haven’t been known to always enforce this. There will be a short grace period once Winter 19 releases to resolve this.

Search Functionality

Searching in Salesforce is a great way of finding records fast without having to navigate through Tabs, List Views or Related Lists, however it hasn’t been known to be “tight” when it comes to returning results – It can and does throw a lot of results back at you.

Going forward you can now customise search results for Knowledge and Communities.

You can now search for opportunities that fall within certain amounts without having to build a report first to do so

Admin Specific Changes

Not everything that Salesforce does is for the users benefits, some of it is aimed at those of us who build and maintain an org.

Deploy Active Processes and Flows via Changesets

You can now deploy process and flows via Change Sets without having to then activate them in production, and the number of Active processes and flows has seen a massive increase up from 500 to 2000.

It is worth noting that if you follow best practice, you should rarely if ever need 500 flows!

Field Sets. In Lighting?!

It always amazed me that you couldn’t create or edit field sets in lightning, you had to switch back to classic for this. Now, I can stop being amazed and do this really obvious thing.

Don’t forget to check out other posts in our blog for Admin help, tricks and tips  hyphen8.com/blog