3 Reasons to Make the Jump to Salesforce Lightning with Spring '18 Release

It's that time of year again! Salesforce's Spring '18 Release is imminent and I couldn't be more excited! The team at Salesforce have outdone themselves once again and packed their update full of fantastic features! I'm really excited to share some of my favourites!

Something you may notice with these features is that they're all exclusive to Lightning. Salesforce has been focusing on the Lightning Platform in recent updates with Classic getting less love, which is only natural. With all the work they've been putting into Salesforce, now may be the right time for your business to move over to Lightning!

To help with this decision, Salesforce have built a Trailhead Unit! Very helpful!

Custom Themes

Salesforce introduced a new look a feel with Winter '18 which improved the user experience by increasing readability by removing a lot of white space. They've taken it a step further with Spring '18 by allowing us to now customise our org's theme!

In my test environment, I've replaced the Salesforce logo with our own and changed the Brand Colour to match. I've then set the Page Background and Global Header colours according to our preferences. Salesforce has then generated the Brand-Based Colour Palette automatically based on my selections so far. Check it out!

Themes and Branding is one of the elements that makes up myLightning, which was announced during Dreamforce 2017. You can read more about myLightning here.

Path Improvements

I'm so glad Salesforce have expanded on the functionality of Sales Paths, I personally think they're one of the best 'exclusive to Lightning' features! Now you can set up a Path on any picklist field on a Standard Object! You're no longer limited to only using Stage or Status field. Read more here.

Also, Paths now support Campaigns!

Campaign Improvements (Including Pardot Campaign Alignment Beta!)

Campaigns have been tweaked to allow room for major improvement in Spring '18. You can use Paths on Campaigns now (as mentioned above) and speed up the creation of your Campaign Members, which are two fantastic features. My personal favourite new feature is the direct connection of Salesforce Campaigns to Pardot Campaigns (Note:This feature is in Beta in Spring '18).

This is a very very cool addition to Salesforce for those Pardot fans among us. Long have we maintained multiple campaigns across Pardot and Salesforce for a single purpose, but those days are over! Now we can sync those Campaign records directly between Salesforce and Pardot. If you've set everything up correctly, you can simply create a Campaign record within Salesforce and it will be pushed across and synchronised with Pardot.

Note: Salesforce have made a note on this release note stating that, as a beta feature, it is in preview and may not be readily available for all orgs. It's also not currently supported by Salesforce and Salesforce is not liable for any hard, damage, or data loss. I feel it is important I make note of this while touting the feature.

Read more about the changes to Campaigns here!

You can read more about Spring '18 by reading the Spring '18 Release Notes published by Salesforce. I'm over the moon with the features that are coming and can't wait to help my clients put them into practice!

Have you got a favourite Flow element? No? Just me? Ah well, I’m proud to have a favourite Flow element! The Decision element allows your Flow to change shape or purpose at any point, dynamically! This means that depending what you feed it, it can do a completely different thing!