The salesforce.com Winter ’15 release brings along exciting new features and functionality.
In this blog post, I will review 5 of the most important changes you can look forward to in this release.
In this blog post, I will review 5 of the most important changes you can look forward to in this release.
1. Duplicate Management
Finally Salesforce is delivering a solution dealing with duplicates in Salesforce, but only to those orgs that have data.com enabled for them.
This new feature allows admin to help users identify duplicate accounts, contacts or leads. In addition, admins are able to define the data policy for such cases, by either blocking users from creating duplicates or simply notifying them of the possible duplicate. If a user decide to go ahead with creating a duplicate, the record is marked behind the scenes, allowing admins and system managers to review potential duplicates in an orderly report.
A major drawback of the solution, as it stands today in the pilot, is that duplicates are only searched within each object. This means that if a user creates a lead that is a duplicate of an existing contact, this will not be recognized. In addition, leads are not matched against converted leads, obviously a big issue. But non the less, this is great news as it is a major step in an area that had much demand but very little answers from Salesforce until now.
This new feature allows admin to help users identify duplicate accounts, contacts or leads. In addition, admins are able to define the data policy for such cases, by either blocking users from creating duplicates or simply notifying them of the possible duplicate. If a user decide to go ahead with creating a duplicate, the record is marked behind the scenes, allowing admins and system managers to review potential duplicates in an orderly report.
A major drawback of the solution, as it stands today in the pilot, is that duplicates are only searched within each object. This means that if a user creates a lead that is a duplicate of an existing contact, this will not be recognized. In addition, leads are not matched against converted leads, obviously a big issue. But non the less, this is great news as it is a major step in an area that had much demand but very little answers from Salesforce until now.
2. Lookups on Activities
Often you need to attach a task or an event to more than one object in Salesforce, for example, an Account and a custom object, but you could not create a lookup custom field on the activity object. This limitation often led to complex designs or to inefficient work processes. In Winter 15 Salesforce has removed this basic limitation, allowing more flexibility in designing activities oriented business processes. The feature is still in beta, so currently you can only have a single custom lookup to each object (i.e. having “Contact” and “Previous Contract”, both lookups to the Contract object, is not supported).
Image taken from salesforce.com Winter ’15 Release Notes
3. Improved Setup Search
Setup search is a rather new ability allowing admins to search for metadata components in the setup page, rather than manually navigate to find the component. With Winter 15, more component types are supported in the search, the most useful ones including:
- Workflow Rules
- Workflow Field Updates
- Workflow Email Alerts
- Workflow Task
- Workflow Outbound Message
- Approval Processes
The system only searches the name of the component, so be sure to search by name and by description, parent object or criteria.
4. Remote Objects are Generally Available
This is a major upgrade allowing Visualforce developers to access Salesforce records (query CRUD) using pure Javascript. The major difference from Remote Action is that using Remote Objects allows developer to implement entirely functional Visualforce pages without the need for a controller.
Remote objects has an important limit to keep in mind – you can only query 100 records at a time. It’s more a solution when you want to avoid the client-server communications or have to handle complex front end logic.
Here’s a link for best practices when implementing Remote Objects.
Remote objects has an important limit to keep in mind – you can only query 100 records at a time. It’s more a solution when you want to avoid the client-server communications or have to handle complex front end logic.
Here’s a link for best practices when implementing Remote Objects.
5. Queueable Interface
The queueable interface that was launched in Winter 15 allows users to add asynchronous jobs to the jobs queue. This is nothing new, it was possible before using future calls, but now a job ID is generated, allowing you to check the status of the job programmatically.
The biggest value in the queueable interface is actually not the job ID, but rather the ability to chain events. This means that you can add a job to the queue, and add a new job to the queue once the previous job has completed. This is super useful and long missing from the platform, as often one runs into a scenario where a job must run to completion before it makes sense to start a new job. The implementation of the chaining is very simple – just add a job to the queue from the existing job’s “execute” method and Salesforce will automatically launch the new job only when the current one completes, simple!
The biggest value in the queueable interface is actually not the job ID, but rather the ability to chain events. This means that you can add a job to the queue, and add a new job to the queue once the previous job has completed. This is super useful and long missing from the platform, as often one runs into a scenario where a job must run to completion before it makes sense to start a new job. The implementation of the chaining is very simple – just add a job to the queue from the existing job’s “execute” method and Salesforce will automatically launch the new job only when the current one completes, simple!
No comments:
Post a Comment