King's Koolest Salesforce Features (Summer 19 Preview Edition Part 2)

A few weeks ago I posted Part 1 of my "Release Preview" blog series about the latest and greatest that Salesforce is bringing us this summer in its Summer 19 release. By now I think a lot of you have been playing with Summer 19. If you have not yet, I got you covered. In this post, I will continue showing you some other exciting new features that you can expect to see starting around mid June 2019.

First of all, I have to give myself a pat on the back. You may remember I said in my last post that an idea I submitted was under consideration. It's happening! It is the first time that my idea is going to be realized, and I am very proud! As a reminder, starting from Summer 19, when you are exiting Flow Builder, you will no longer be brought to the master flow list; you will be landing on the detail page of the flow you're exiting from. I believe it makes more sense, and it looks like Salesforce agrees too.

In-App Guidance for Onboarding - What is the best way to catch your users' attention when you release a new feature? Display a non-intrusive prompt! Salesforce has been very successful converting its users from Classic to Lightning, and they have done so by providing excellent in-app guidance. (In fact, when I'm in my Summer 19 instance, every 30 minute or so, the in-app guidance pops up with a new Summer 19 feature.) Summer 19 gives you the possibility of curating your own content. You can either let your prompt float in one of six positions on the screen, or you can dock it at the bottom right of the screen.

Record Context switch between Classic and Lightning - The idea is simple: if you are in Classic viewing a record and switch to Lightning, previously you would be redirected to the Home page (or whichever default landing page that was set up) in Lightning; starting from Summer 19, you will navigate to the record's Lightning Record Page. Quite frankly, I am including this one into my post only because at one point I got asked about this feature a lot - I could've written an entire post on this feature alone if this were introduced in Summer 17 or Summer 18. As more and more organizations have now switched to Lightning, the demand for this feature has significantly reduced (although it's still a nice feature for people who have not completely converted to Lightning such as myself). An observation: though you can switch the record page view from Classic to Lightning, the opposite is not true. That again proves to show Salesforce really wants people to leave Classic altogether and migrate to Lightning.

Navigation Bar improvement - It is one of my favorites in this release. So simple, but such big win! Whenever you click the pull-down menu next to your tab now, you usually see a New link to create a new record, recently viewed records and recently viewed list views (refer to the left image below). Really, really, nothing wrong with that.

With Summer 19, first of all, you will now also see any records that have been tagged as a favorite. Second, the different sections are now more distinctly presented so you can really see the different sections, thanks to a dividing line in-between sections. Compare the following yourself, and you will see the improvement in the item menus definitely gives much better user experience.

Reports & Dashboards - I really like how Salesforce has been improving reports and dashboards so much lately: joined report, conditional highlighting, etc. The momentum has not stopped for Summer 19.

Row level formulas (BETA) - You've experienced it all before. You have this Close Date field in Opportunity. You need to report on it AND how many days has it passed today. You put on your Admin hat, create a new formula field, type in "TODAY() - CloseDate", set your field level permission, you may have to add it to your Report Type if you use custom report type for the report, and finally you go back to your Report Builder and add this new field in.

So... many... steps.....

Say hello to row level formulas! Located under the "Columns" section in the Outline pane, this "Add Row-Level Formula (BETA)" link will open up a new window, letting you configure this report column. Once you have defined it, the column becomes available immediately for your reporting. (NOTE that since this is a beta feature, for now you will need to first enable this feature in your Reports and Dashboards Settings.)

Search within Report - So now you have a few hundreds of rows in your report. You would like to quickly find out how your top salesperson Johnny is doing. Sure you can set a filter, but then you need to go into edit mode, which means you need to have permission to edit reports. But really, you're just doing ad-hoc queries here, so the number of steps involved is just counter productive. Summer 19 provides a new search feature so you can just type in your search string, and the report will highlight the searched results.

Dashboard Component Sorting improvements - There are going to be so many improvements around dashboards in Summer 19 in so many ways.

• Sorting by groups and measure: First of all, when editing dashboard components, it has always been very confusing to me when I see these options under "Sort By": "Value Ascending", "Value Descending", "Label Ascending" and "Label Descending". This is especially true if you have multiple groupings in your source reports. Which values or which labels are being used, the first grouping or second grouping? Summer 19 removes all these ambiguities. First, the sort direction is now represented as a picture button in which the arrowhead depicts the sorting direction oh-so-clearly, which is already a win. Second, instead of using generic words "value" and "label", the Sort By picklist now shows you your group names and your aggregated column names. In my dashboard component, I now have the choice between "Type", my first level grouping", and "Sum of Annual Revenue" which is what I have summarized.

• Two level sorting: It gets better! Dashboard components now also provide two level sorting functionality. So if you would like, you can now sort your data by Sum of Annual Revenue, and then by Industry.
• Lightning Table subtotal: Similar changes are brought over to Lightning Table. First of all, Lightning Table has already been using the group names and measure names for sorting instead of "Label" and "Value", but the sorting direction was using radio buttons before. With Summer 19, sorting direction uses the same picture icon like other dashboard components to be consistent. Also, if you include more than one level of grouping in your Lightning Table, you also have the option to display subtotals.

NOTE: You may have noticed that my Lightning Table does not seem to be sorting properly. In my Type column above, you might think that "Customer" should have come first. Remember that whenever you use a picklist, the order of the picklist values is totally dependent on how you have set it up at the field level. I set the picklist values in this order because most of my account types are "Prospect", and "Customer" is the least commonly selected choice. Salesforce, including reports, totally respect that order.

To circumvent that, I thought I would use the new Row-level Formula feature to create a text version of the picklist field - once it's a text field and not a picklist field, I will then be able to sort this cloned field alphabetically. No luck (yet). Row-level Formula, as of this beta version in Summer 19, does not provide Text or String category functions, so I was not able to create this formula: "Text(Picklist__c)". I hope you can help make it happen by voting on this idea of mine.

• Resizing Lightning Table columns: Finally, you may have noticed that I have two picklist values that start with "Technology", but my Lightning Table above only shows the first word because of the width of the column. Summer 19 solves this problem quickly and easily by allowing table columns to be resizable.

Einstein Analytics Improvements - One of the things that I hear from people all the time about Einstein Analytics is that SAQL, JSON and bindings are easy to understand but extremely hard to master. Really, release after release Salesforce spends lots of efforts to make it easier for people to design lenses and dashboards without having to write SAQL or JSON or manipulate bindings. Summer 19 has done it again!

Filter Logic - You have used filter logic in many places in Salesforce already: case assignment / escalation rules, report builder, list views, process builder, etc. You have a lot of complex logic you need to build, and they are rarely straightforward "AND" or "OR" - they are usually complex, such as "(A && B) || (NOT C && D)". Einstein Analytics is no different; only that if you were trying to do complex logic before, you would have to edit SAQL. Your wait is over! Summer 19 now also provides filter logic when you're exploring a dataset.

Those who know me know that I have a pretty huge CD collection (about 8000 CDs - I finally stopped buying them around 2016). I decided to load my CD database into Einstein Analytics for some data exploration.

The image here shows my Music Album dataset.

I'm trying to find in my CD collection any music singles (if you know what that even means) that are made in Canada and that are packaged in two discs. (If you are interested, I have one such CD single, Glory Times by Portishead, a very cool trip hop piece of music; Einstein Analytics reports it accurately.) The below image on the left shows what my filter looks like. But what if instead I want to find any titles that are made in Canada, OR any singles that have more than one disc? Summer 19 makes it so easy! You can just expand the actions menu next to the word "Filters" and configure the complex logic like you have done so many times in other places in Salesforce. The image on the right shows my filter logic.

This is pretty huge because you no longer need to edit SAQL directly. Remember that once you use a SAQL to query data, you cannot go back to point and click to further explore you data - you would need to keep using SAQL.

Sort by Dimensions - Another thing that you now can easily do starting with Summer 19, without having to edit SAQL is sorting your dataset by dimensions. You might say, well, whenever you explore a lens and start grouping your data, your data is immediately sorted by that grouping. For example, I'm looking for any of my CDs that are by Kanye West, and I am grouping them by title artist names. Sure enough, the CD titles are by default sorted by title artists, alphabetically.

What if I want to sort title artists in descending order though? Ah... SAQL, unfortunately. Up until now, that is the only way. Thankfully, Summer 19 once again makes it so simple. All you need to do is to click the actions menu next to the grouping (Artist__c.Name in this case), and now you are able to select the sorting direction. Just like that, no need to touch SAQL.

Better filter in Einstein Next Best Action - Have you heard about NBA in Salesforce yet? No it has nothing to do with basketball. Rather, it is a new feature that has been available since Spring 19. NBA can read your data you have in Salesforce, or even reach out to external systems if needed, and help you deliver optional recommendations to both internal users as well as external such as community members.  It may sound complicated, but imagine you have a community for foodies. You would like to send a recipe book to any of your visitors that are having their birthday today. NBA is a good use case for that. (Rather than going into detail how it works, I invite you to a trailhead module on this topic.)

When it was first introduced, the filter (which defines what or who you are trying to target) can only be written if you have the Help manual with you.

Summer 19 makes the filter expression easier to construct.

Of course, complex expressions like the above can still only be done using the Advanced tab.

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That's it! I hope you have enjoyed reading this blog post. Again, this is just a very small subset of many great features that Summer 19 is bringing us. Make sure you check out the release notes, and don't forget the Summer 19 Release Highlights on Trailhead!