It’s time for the next quarterly release – the Salesforce Summer ’19 release. We know it is quite a challenge for you to go through the 503-pages release notes, so we did the heavy lifting for you. In this article, we highlighted the best features from this release.

myTrailhead – Reinvent Learning at Your Company

In Salesforce Summer ’19 release, myTrailhead promotes a culture of continuous learning that keeps employees engaged and nurtures their career development. Your HR department can create content to welcome new employees and orient them to their job and your company. Project Managers and learning professionals can design custom training programs, such as project management, sales processes, service case management, or career navigation.

You can format your content, add graphics and videos, and create quizzes with Trailmaker Content, an intuitive content-styling tool. You can create releases for your content, and publish them with the click of a button using Trailmaker Release. The best part is the ability to customize myTrailhead with your company’s imagery and color using the Branding feature.

Note that myTrailhead is available to customers with Enterprise, Performance, or Unlimited editions for an extra cost.

While myTrailhead is completely personalized with your company’s training material, you can learn about Salesforce products and its features from the original Trailhead modules. With over 140 trails and 540 modules, it is quite intimidating to get started with Trailhead. Well, do not worry yet as we have made things a little easier for you by writing these two great posts to get you started – Top 5 Most Helpful Salesforce Trailhead Trails and Top Salesforce Trailhead Trails To Learn Common Salesforce Objects.

Transition Assistant: Everything You Need in One Place

The Transition Assistant from the Salesforce Summer ’19 release puts the Salesforce Admins in the driver’s seat on the journey to Lightning Experience. You can get guidance on key activities, from evaluating readiness and building a business case, preparing your implementation and going live, to tracking and driving user adoption. And ultimately, turning off Salesforce Classic.

For easier manageability, the Transition Assistant breaks up the process into three phases. Each phase walks you through the steps and tools that speed up the work:

1. Discover Phase
2. Roll-Out Phase and
3. Optimize Phase

In each phase, activities are organized into a series of stages that keep things organized, help you monitor your progress, and inspire confidence that nothing important has been overlooked.

Switching from Salesforce Classic to Lightning Experience

When you switch from Salesforce Classic to Lightning Experience, you land on the same page in Lightning Experience, if it exists. If the same page doesn’t exist in Lightning Experience, you are redirected to your default landing page, which is determined by the org default or your customizations.

Still wondering to-switch or not-to-switch to Lightning?

Add Opportunity Contact Roles More Efficiently in Lightning Experience

Contact roles specify the part that each contact plays in an account (company), case, contract, or opportunity. When you use contact roles, your sales team always knows who to contact and when.

To add a contact role from within an opportunity, click Contact Roles, and then click Add Contact Roles. A list of all the contacts for the account appears. The current primary contact is shown, along with a list of the opportunity contact roles that have already been added.

Historical Tracking Reports In Lightning

You no longer need to switch back to Salesforce Classic to create meaningful reports on how your business is changing. Create, edit, and view all your historical tracking reports in Lightning Experience. Historical tracking reports (also called historical trending reports) help you capture changes in key business metrics over time.

Which Objects Were Searched at a Glance

Wait a moment, are you getting started into Salesforce? Then you might want to learn more about the most common Salesforce objects from Trailhead before you look into this new feature of object search results. We’ve consolidated a list of the best and most helpful Salesforce Trailhead Trails and Modules to learn all about Salesforce Objects.

On the search results page, it’s easier for users to see which objects were searched and how many results were found. The Top Results page shows the best results for the objects you use most. In the sidebar, objects are listed in order of relevance, so the best matches are at the top.

When you have more than five results, it shows “5+” on the Top Results page. Click the object name to see the complete list. Click Expand List and select another object. If an object doesn’t have a count next to it, click the object’s name to search it.

Two Record View Options (Beta) in Salesforce Summer ’19 release

Now you have two record page view default options. Choose between the current view—now called Grouped view—and the new Full view. The Full view displays all details and related lists on the same page. This view is similar to Salesforce Classic.

1. Full view (1) displays all details and related lists on the same page.
2. Grouped view (2), the original Lightning Experience record view, focuses on specifics by grouping information across tabs and columns.

Item Menus on the Navigation Bar in Salesforce Summer ’19 release

Lightning navigation bar at the top of the page lets the users:

• Find what they need using item names for easy recognition
• Complete actions and access recent records and lists with a single click
• Personalize the navigation bar to suit the unique way they work

In this release, Salesforce has Increased the number of recent records shown in item menus from 3 to 5.

Custom Colors to Hyperlinks

Complete the look and feel of your company’s theming and branding in the Salesforce Summer ’19 release Lightning Experience by defining a hyperlink color. In Setup, select Themes and Branding. Update an existing custom theme or create a new one. For Link Color, select Use brand color.

How Activities Display on Record Pages in Salesforce Summer ’19 release

In the Salesforce Summer ’19 release, you can now control how your users view activities on record pages. Set the default view to the newer expandable activity timeline, or choose the activities related lists view. Users can switch between options whenever they want.

Activity timeline shows details for each task, event, and email in an expandable timeline view.

Related lists show details for each task, event, and email in the Open Activities and Activity History related lists.

Related Lists with Quick Filters in Salesforce Summer ’19 release

Use quick filters in your related lists to find the data that you’re looking for. Related list quick filters are different from regular list view filters in that they aren’t saved, persist only throughout your current session, and can’t be shared.

Enhanced Related Lists in Salesforce Summer ’19 release

With Enhanced Related Lists, you can show up to 10 columns, resize and sort your columns, perform mass actions, and wrap text. Choosing Enhanced List affects all related lists in the component.

Choose Email Composer When Clicking Email Addresses

When sales reps click an email address to write an email, the Salesforce email composer now opens by default. Reps can choose to have their default email composer open instead.

To update the Email composer settings, go to Personal Settings, enter Email in the Quick Find box, then select My Email Settings. Choose ‘Salesforce Email Composer’ or ‘Default Email Application’ as per your preference.

To make your team even more efficient, read how you can use Salesforce to send emails quicker than ever before.

Get Task Notifications by Email

Currently, Salesforce displays event and task reminders in a reminder window. The reminder window opens whenever a reminder is triggered. When you log in, a sound plays if you have reminders that have been triggered since the last time you logged in.

If you do not login to Salesforce, you might miss the notifications completely and also if there are too many notifications, you might miss them too. To address that, Salesforce now allows you to set the Task Notifications to land in your email inbox as well. To update the settings, go to personal settings, enter Activity in the Quick Find box, then select Activity Reminders.

Summary

The Salesforce Summer ’19 release increases productivity and delivers personalized customer journeys with the latest Platform innovations. Some features in the Salesforce Summer ’19 release affect all users immediately after the release goes live. Consider communicating these changes to your users beforehand so that they’re prepared. Other features require direct action by an administrator before users can benefit from the new functionality, so feel free to share this article with your Salesforce Admin.

References:

• PDF version of the release notes
• HTML version of the release notes
• Youtube Summer ‘19 Release Preview Video
• Top 5 Most Helpful Salesforce Trailhead Trails
• Top Salesforce Trailhead Trails To Learn Common Salesforce Objects
• Salesforce Lightning – To Switch, or Not To Switch, That Is The Question
• Use Salesforce to Send Emails Quicker Than Ever Before