If you are a university using sfdc , this blog  lists  the key features on spring 16 which would add value to your institution. I have categorized the features into 3 buckets namely more capability, save your time and prevent problems.  If  your university uses service cloud as a one stop solution, the below feature would help.

More capability

Track workorders on your assets.

If you are using service cloud as a one stop solution, the new workorder object would help you to track issues on your assets which your students use or lend from your IT service center. This would help to track the status of problems on the assets and also help to report to students on external vendors who work on the work orders as well.

Track your assets with complex hierarchies.

If your one stop service center manages a lot of assets , the new capability to create complex hierarchies would help to category your assets and track the performance of them from a big picture perspective. This can also help in decision making on the category of the assets like hardware, software etc and help in the long run.

Endorse Skills feature for community cloud

If you are using salesforce community for your student and alumni portals, there is a new feature where community members can endorse other students on skills. This is similar to Linked in endorsing skills feature. This feature should help you to increase your adoption where students can be endorsed for skills and would allow community members to reach the right student at the right time.

Save Time features

Automatically reroute to agents if no agents are available

If you are the chat service of salesforce, the automatic rerouting feature would reroute the chat request to agents who are readily available instead of waiting on other agents who might be busy with existing customers. This prevents angry students who are on hold and can get their service request done quickly.

Saving time on redeployment

If you are having a lot of sharing rules , it always takes a lot of time to do deployment because of the recalculation done in sharing rules. This could also lead to a lot of data errors in permission causing a lot of time taken to fix them. In spring 16, there is a feature where you can turn off the recalculation of the permissions and run it in one  attempt . Salesforce  would then rerun the permissions on invoked which would save a lot of time.

Prevent problems.

Global picklist

The new global picklist feature  which is in pilot now could serve as a great problem reducer. Remember the program of interest picklist which you have on your leads, contacts and also opportunities if you are using and if you change in one place, as of now you have to change in all the objects. Instead with the global picklist, the program of interest can be declared as a global picklist and this would reused across all objects in one place instead of every object.

Connect to your sandbox from the marketing cloud

If you are using the marketing cloud, the new release of marketing cloud has the feature where each business unit can be connected to each sfdc org. This would help to test the features ahead before you deploy to production. You can create a separate business unit for development and connect to the development sandbox and test the integration issues ahead.

So using the above features, you can save more time, add more capabilities and prevent problems with your salesforce instance.  Please feel free to email me at buyan@eigenx.com for any further questions and I would be glad to explain these features further.