7 Salesforce Winter ‘19 Updates Everyone Should Know About

Ladies and gentlemen, the Salesforce Winter ‘19 release is upon us. As one influencer said in her advice to Salesforce

5 min. read

Ladies and gentlemen, the Salesforce Winter ‘19 release is upon us. As one influencer said in her advice to Salesforce newcomers, these triannual updates level the playing field between platform experts and novices — when they come out, nobody knows everything about Salesforce. Everybody needs some amount of research to figure out how the release will affect them.

And, on the one hand, it’s impossible to tell you how the Winter ‘19 release will influence your team specifically. Its impact depends on a host of factors:

So the only way to truly understand what the release means to you is to read through the sections of the Winter ‘19 release notes that apply to your Salesforce build. But we’ve found 7 Salesforce Winter ‘19 updates that can affect users of all kinds — business leaders, end users and admins — regardless of how you use the platform. Now, some of these changes don’t apply to Classic, so consider these updates even more reason to switch to Salesforce Lightning if you haven’t already. But regardless, with all the new functionality these updates offer, we think everyone should know about them.

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Salesforce Winter ‘19 Release — 7 Updates Everyone Should Know About

1. Support for Internet Explorer 9 and 10 is ending

April 5th, 2019 is an important date to know if you’re still using Internet Explorer (IE) 9 or 10 with Salesforce. At that point, Salesforce will no longer support those browsers. Note the term “support” here. You’ll still be able to accomplish limited tasks in Salesforce on these browser versions. But if you encounter errors on them, you’re on your own — Salesforce support can’t help you.

So end users, now’s the best time to upgrade to IE 11 or switch to a different browser. And business leaders and admins will want to make sure all of their users are utilizing supported browsers with Salesforce.

2. Salesforce Optimizer

Ever wonder if you’re getting the most out of Salesforce? Our team has created numerous blogs — and even an interactive quiz — on this topic, and now Salesforce has added a free in-app Optimizer to provide you with individualized results on your Salesforce health.

Salesforce Optimizer sample results

Just run it in your org, and it will send you a PDF of your results via email. Understand your org inefficiencies, ways to boost adoption, where you’re in danger of hitting Salesforce limits and where you have unused fields & automations — all with a single click.

3. List view search

Salesforce list views are great ways of seeing groups of related records at once. And Salesforce’s global search makes it easy to find the information you need. But organizations with high data volumes can struggle with both: List views return too many records, and global search runs too slowly.

So Salesforce put the two together with its new list view search functionality. Now, you can search through a pre-filtered set of records, to return only the results you need instead of searching through the entire platform. Finding the right information just got that much faster.

Report list view search

Note: This functionality is only available in Salesforce Lightning.

4. Reassign multiple records at once

Similarly within list views, users can now reassign multiple records (up to 200 leads, cases or custom objects) to the same person at once.

Reassign multiple records at once

No more wasting time reassigning leads one by one. No need to ask your admin to transfer records for you. The next time you add a new rep to Salesforce, you can save hours when assigning the right records to them.

Note: This functionality is only available in Salesforce Lightning.

5. Share multiple files publicly, at once

Speaking of bulk actions, you can also now share entire folders of Salesforce Files to people outside of Salesforce. Previously you could share files, one at a time, via a public URL. But with the new release, you can seamlessly share many of them at once, so long as they’re in the same folder.

Public link sharing

Note: This functionality is only available in Salesforce Lightning. If you’re unable to generate public sharing links within Salesforce, make sure that your admin has set up Libraries and has given you the correct user permissions.

6. Recover your unsaved work (on Chatter & records)

Ever had Salesforce time out on you in the middle of a long, heartfelt Chatter post? Or when making extensive changes to a record? Well, Salesforce has updated their settings to let you recover unsaved text during session timeout.

Note: This functionality is only available in Salesforce Lightning and the Salesforce app.

For Salesforce Chatter specifically, the platform will now automatically save posts as drafts. If you accidentally lose a message, go to the “My Drafts” node in the Chatter tab to find autosaved posts and pick up where you left off.

Chatter posts as drafts

Note: This feature is only available if your admin enables it in the “Chatter Settings” node of the setup menu.

7. Check a field's dependencies (PILOT — not generally available)

As a Salesforce admin, I’ve always been afraid of phasing out old fields — even ones that nobody uses — because it’s been difficult to know if some behind-the-scenes automation, code or validation rule depends on them.

That’s what makes the new “Where Is This Used?” button so valuable for admins. This feature checks what other parts of your org — formulas, validation rules, page layouts, flows & processes, apex triggers & classes, etc. — depend on a field before you edit or delete it.

Field dependency button(Image Credit)

Field dependency results(Image Credit)

It’s important to note that this is a pilot feature that’s only available by default to select customers right now. Check for it in your org following the release. If it’s not available, contact Salesforce support for more information on enabling it. Regardless of whether it’s available to you following this release or later, this feature will represent a major boon to any admin when it reaches your org. Be on the lookout for it!

Again, you’ll notice that many of these updates only work in Lightning. Salesforce is increasingly rolling out Lightning-only changes as it works to convert all customers to the newer UI. So to get the most out of this release, we recommend getting your users on Lightning as quickly as possible. Check out our on-demand webinar on how to get your team to love Salesforce Lightning in 7 steps if you need help.

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AUTHOR

Danielle Sutton