If you are in Higher Education using Salesforce, this post would help you to prepare for key features which would help you to do more, provide insights to your users and prevent problems.
Admissions
Do More
- Expanded Enforcement of Daily External Email Limit for New Orgs
Each org can send 5,000 single emails per day to external email addresses. For orgs created in Spring ’19 and later, this daily limit is also enforced for email alerts, simple email actions, Send Email actions, and REST API. If one of the newly counted emails can’t be sent because your org has reached the limit, we notify you by email and add an entry to the debug logs. For orgs created before Spring ’19, the daily limit is enforced only for emails sent via Apex and Salesforce APIs except the REST API.
If you are a new salesforce user, you would send 5000 emails per day and for current customers, it is only applicable for custom code only.
Prevent Problem
Account For Your Customers’ Email Opt Out Preferences
If your students choose Email Opt Out or the Don’t Market email privacy setting, your institution should send them non-commercial emails only, such as product shipping updates and service plan changes. Previously, Salesforce didn’t account for these settings and didn’t send any emails to these students.
You can prevent admission folks from sending email to students with these privacy settings by removing their Send Non-Commercial Email permission.
If you are GDPR compliant, now you can have sales reps send transactional emails to customers when the send Non-commercial email option is turned on.
Cloud flow designer would be retiring soon
With the new flow builder coming up, the old cloud flow designer will be retired since it is built in Flash. So stay on top with the new cloud flow builder which is faster, much simpler to use.
Saving Time
Return Bounced Emails to Senders as Attached Files
Help reps keep track of emails that aren’t delivered by returning bounced messages to them. When an email bounces, it is now sent as an email attachment to the sender’s email address. Returning bounced emails as attachments comply with security measures that help to protect against fraudulent emails.
How to use it: For companies handling privacy emails, instead of now handling the bounced emails to a separate mailbox, the sender will be notified on this and he can talk to the contact or lead and fix the email saving time.
Access Salesforce Information Directly from Google Calendar
Since most of the institutions use Gmail, there is now a new Chrome extension which you should use for integrating wiht Gmail called Salesforce. If you using Gmail for your emails, admission reps can now easily access the matching Salesforce data while viewing or creating an event in a Calendar view. No more double-clicking the event to drill into the details to see Salesforce data.
Log Emails to People Who Aren’t Email Recipients from Outlook and Gmail
Previously, admission reps could log emails from Microsoft® Outlook or Gmail to contacts, leads, and personal accounts in Salesforce that matched an address in the To or CC fields in the email. Because an email can include important information, reps can now log messages to any people record, ensuring that pertinent information is recorded in Salesforce. Sales reps can search for other people using global search in the Gmail integration pane. Emails logged to other people records are included in the record’s activity timeline.
Use Salesforce email templates in Outlook and Gmail
If you are using lightning for outlook and Gmail, you can now allow your users to send emails using salesforce email templates easily. The user can select the template and send the email from your favorite device.
Marketing
Pardot
Configure the Salesforce-Pardot Connector with Improved Navigation and Design
Connect your sales and marketing teams faster with the redesigned Salesforce-Pardot connector edit page. You can now configure Connected Campaigns, Salesforce User Sync, and Marketing Data Sharing right from the connector page. While editing your connector, select a tab to see your options.
This would help you to use sync campaigns between salesforce and pardot and also choose the right records to be synced between pardot and salesforce.
Choose Which Records Sync Between Salesforce and Pardot
Gone are the days of adjusting sharing rules and organization-wide defaults. Now you can use Marketing Data Sharing to decide what syncs between Salesforce and Pardot. And because selective sync rules are managed in Pardot, you don’t need to be a Salesforce admin or even have a Sales Cloud license.
See Marketing Asset Performance on Campaigns (Generally Available)
When you connect Pardot and Salesforce campaigns, you can see exactly how much engagement your marketing campaigns generate, right in Salesforce. Search for campaigns and marketing assets in Salesforce, and view engagement performance from records and reports. No more exporting Pardot asset data to share reports—your users can do everything from Salesforce.
For institutions who use pardot, this is the most important reason on why you should sync campaigns from Salesforce to Pardot.
One Stop Service Center
Suggest the Right Recommendations with Einstein Next Best Action (Generally Available)
Present the best options to your agents and customers, such as a discount, a repair, or a suggested next step. Apply your company’s business rules, predictive models, and data to refine and personalize offers and actions. Einstein Next Best Action refines many possibilities into a few spot-on recommendations, making it easy to deliver a customized service experience.
How this helps: This would be a paid feature which you should check with your account rep on it.
View Transcripts Without a Live Agent License
To provide more consistent support, every user with a Service Cloud license now has a 360-degree view of a customer’s support history and can see past chat transcripts. Previously, a support agent needed a Live Agent license to view chat transcripts. So when a customer chatted with an agent and then followed up on another channel, like email, the new agent couldn’t always see the full history. A Live Agent license is still required to deliver service using Live Agent in the Lightning Service Console.
Student Communities
Increase Engagements by automating badge creation with Missions feature.
Game mechanics, such as using badges, are a great way to get your users involved in your community. However, assigning badges manually can be time-consuming. Instead, use the Missions feature to assign badges automatically. Community managers have their say in what action earns a badge and when it can be awarded, and then Missions takes care of the rest. And members can see which badges they haven’t yet earned, inspiring action.
Why you should use this: This would help you to drive engagement with your students and alumni and also share knowledge.
Help Your Members Stay on Topic
You can configure the Ask button to block users from choosing a new topic when they ask questions under a selected topic. For example, a user selects the topic New Products and clicks the Ask button. But then in the Posting to field, the user selects another topic. To avoid potential confusion about the location of their question, use the new property to help your users keep focus and easily find their way back.
How this helps: This would help you to create topic experts which would be helpful for self-service and engagement.
Provide Search Engines with the Freshest Content Snapshots immediately instead of weekly
Salesforce takes a weekly snapshot of your community’s published public content, which works well for most updates. But let’s say you update a page’s content with important, time-sensitive information, such as price changes for a flash sale. Now, instead of waiting for the weekly update, you can take a snapshot every 24 hours to refresh the page content served to search engines.
How this helps: This would help you to drive more traffic to your student communities.
Help Students Get Answers Fast, and Lighten Your Support Load
When members have questions, put your best information forward, and let them help themselves. Configure the Ask and Contact Support & Ask buttons to respond with pertinent articles and previous answers when users ask questions. Members can cancel a question when the response hits the mark, or they can continue to post their question.
Assess Audience Effectiveness with Google Analytics
Curious about how effective your audience targeting has been? Wondering whether audience members are clicking their target content? Google Analytics tracks the click path of your members so you can understand how different audiences behave when they visit your community. Use this information to help drive engagement.
How this helps: This is a feature which should be used right away. You can view your audience engagement using google analytics.
Give New Users a Taste of Your Community Before They Sign Up
We’ve added async email verification for community self-registration. Async email lets users verify their email address at any time. You send users a verification link in an email message. Users can verify their email address by clicking the link when it’s convenient. Welcome new members by giving them access to your community without delay. You can also customize the email message so that users can recognize your brand.
How this helps: This would allow you to have your student community members to log in and use the community if there is a challenge with email issues.
Localize Login Prompts and Custom Error Messages for Login Discovery
When you use the Login Discovery page type in My Domain and Communities, you can localize the login prompt with a custom label. You can also localize custom login error messages in Apex. For example, you can alert users when they try to log in with a personal email address instead of their corporate email address.
How this helps: With this feature, you can create custom error messages with multilanguage messages using custom labels. This would help in creating international messages for your international students.
See What Your Guest Users See
To take the guesswork out of your community’s security design, you can see what your Lightning community looks like to visitors who haven’t logged in. Previously, when you previewed a community, you were viewing it as an authenticated user, so it was difficult to know exactly what guest users could see.
How to use: You can now preview your community on how anonymous users can see your community.
Admin Power
Display an Image and Capture Address Information More Easily in Your Flows
Two new screen components improve your flows. Use the Display Image component to insert images in flow screens. Use the Address component to display a complete address form that’s customized to your settings.
You can create new forms with standard picklist feature for country and state and create quick forms for your users.
Check a Field’s References Before You Edit It (Beta)
In a sandbox org, you can view the references to a custom field, such as in a formula, layout, or Apex class, with the click of a button. The new Where is this used? button lists where a field is used and where changes to the field appear. You can communicate changes to others who use the field in a formula or other context.
How to use: This is one feature which admins would love and help you save time on impact analysis. This does not do reports and dashboards yet but will be covered in future.
Clone, Deploy, Upload, and Validate Change Sets with Fewer Clicks
You no longer have to load the change set’s detail page to initiate these operations. We added links to the Inbound Change Set page that you can use to initiate validation and deployment operations for both deployed and undeployed changesets. If the change set has been deleted from its source org, these operation links aren’t available. If deployment of the changeset is in progress, these operation links aren’t available until after the deployment completes. We also added links to the Outbound Change Set page that you can use to upload or clone changesets. If the changeset doesn’t contain any components, the Upload link isn’t available.
Save Time by Cloning Sandboxes (Generally Available)
Sandbox cloning simplifies the management of multiple concurrent work streams in your application life cycle. Clone an existing sandbox for each type of work, such as development, testing, and staging. As you move from one development stage to the next, clone an existing sandbox rather than using your production org as the source. This pattern simplifies the customization of individual sandboxes. Your colleagues can easily clone individual sandboxes instead of sharing one sandbox to avoid stepping on each other’s toes.
Developers
Force.com IDE Is Being Retired in October 2019
The Force.com IDE plug-in for Eclipse is in a maintenance-only state. We will still provide support through our official channels for the product until its retirement date on October 12, 2019, but the only updates will be for critical security issues that arise before the retirement date.
How this helps: Developers now should use Visual Studio Code for development going forward.
To summarize, the top 3 features for Higher Education are the following
1. If you are in classic and use standard profiles, be prepared to have users experience lightning end of the year. So your options are to stay away from standard profiles or move to lightning. Click here for next steps on this.
2. Leverage thanks badges and audience features in your communities to drive more engagement.
3. Be prepared to learn how to use the new flow builder instead of the old flow designer.
As always feel free to post your comments or email me at buyan@eigenx.com for questions. 😛
