This year has flown by and it’s time for another update from Salesforce. Today, we’re sharing some important dates and highlights you should watch out for from Winter ‘21 Release.
To start, here are some important dates to keep an eye on:
- August 20th - Pre-release Org sign up
- August 24th - Release notes out
- September 11th - Sandbox Preview, Release Site & Release Module
- September 11th - Preview instances updated to Winter’21
- September 11th - Reset of all incomplete sandbox requests to a non-preview instance
- September 14th - Release Overview Deck/Feature Metrics
- September 18th - Release Weekend 1
- September 18th-25th - Release Readiness Live
- October 9th - Release Weekend 2
- October 16th - Release Weekend 3, non-preview instances updated to Winter '21
Now let’s take a look at some highlights from the release notes. It can be tough to comb through the release notes sometimes, they are long and there’s a lot of information contained within them. We’ve covered some tips for reading through the release notes in a previous post that you can check out here.
Favourite Winter ’21 Features
1. Lead & Opportunity Scoring (available to all) - release notes here and here
Einstein Lead Scoring & Opportunity Scoring used to be paid features but are now being made accessible to the entire Salesforce community. There are some smaller updates like excluding custom opportunity fields from the scoring model and choosing what opportunities will be looked at.
Applies to: Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic in Enterprise, Performance, and Unlimited editions.
Take a look at this video to find out more about Opportunity Scoring.
2. Flow & Dynamic Form Updates - release notes here and here.
Flow updates are becoming bigger and better. You can now trigger on delete, use enhanced debugging, multi-column screens (Pilot), auto-layout canvas (Beta), and have more control of flow launch, decisions, queries, and filters.
With Dynamic records, we can now configure record detail fields and sections inside the Lightning App Builder. This is now available for everyone to enable.
Applies to: Lightning Experience in Group, Professional, Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited, and Developer editions.
3. Salesforce Anywhere - Collaborate in Real-Time Records release notes here.
Announced only a few months ago, Salesforce already released the beta for Salesforce Anywhere. Salesforce believes Salesforce Anywhere to be the future experience of CRM.
Salesforce Anywhere gives users the ability to collaborate in real-time via video inside of salesforce. The idea is to ‘work out of the office not out of the loop’. The ability to collaborate via instant messaging & video chat from right inside a Salesforce Record makes Salesforce Anywhere a must-have tool for any Org!
You can sign your Org up to be enabled here.
You can learn more about Salesforce Anywhere here or watch the video below.
4. Interactive Email Builder - release notes here.
For all you marketing heads out there, it is now easier and faster to create email templates. Utilising the drag and drop feature, you can now drag & drop elements instead of using HTML code to create email templates.
Applies to: Lightning Experience in Essentials, Professional, Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited, and Developer editions, and all editions of Pardot in the Pardot Lightning app. This feature isn’t available in Pardot Classic or the standalone Pardot app.
5. Display Survey Pages Based on Your Data [Survey Enhancements] - See notes here.
You can now have Salesforce determine which survey page participants to view next using the data from your Org. Using variables to define conditions, associated record to merge field variables
Applies to: Lightning Experience in Performance, Enterprise, Developer, and Unlimited editions where Salesforce Surveys is enabled.
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