Spring 19 features (Lightning) for Higher Education which would make you do more, prevent problems and generate more insights.

If you are in Higher Education using Salesforce and Lightning, 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

Jump Right into Your Most Important List View with Pinned Lists

Do you have a go-to list view that you want to load as your default list? Now you can. With pinned lists, your admission team can directly go to the prospective student list view of their choice making them do their job quick in the morning.

Print a Record Page

Print key details and related lists from a record page in Lightning Experience, just as in Salesforce Classic. Specify record details visibility on the printable page and print the page from the browser. This feature is available for all users, for Account, Campaign, Case, Contact, Contract, Lead, Opportunity, Order, and custom objects.

How to leverage this: This would help you to print the details of a student record for a quick view.

Create Personalized Appointments with Lightning Scheduler

Delight your students and prospects by scheduling appointments with the right person at the right time and place. Use Lightning Scheduler to quickly set up appointments within standard Salesforce workflows, such as leads and referrals, opportunities, and accounts. And with greater visibility into appointments, you can assign resources more efficiently and better address customer needs.

Why: Here are some of the things you can do with Lightning Scheduler.

Create records that represent your employees, and add details about their skills, locations, and availability.
Define office locations and operating hours.
Create appointment topics, such as campus visits, event locations.
Search for employees with the right skills for an appointment, including certifications and areas of expertise.
Schedule customer appointments, and add details about required attendees.

Why this is important: For institutions looking for an appointment management system, this could be an option but this has an add on cost.

Organize Email Templates with Folders and Nesting

You and your sales reps can now organize email templates into more folders than just Private and Public. And nesting folders makes it easier to organize and find email templates.

Why this is important: For institutions sending mass emails to prospective students, you can now organize your email templates with admissions, marketing etc.

Check Tasks Off Your List with a Click

Closing tasks isn’t a burdensome task anymore. Instead of scrolling through the Status dropdown list, sales reps can mark tasks complete with one click.

Why this is important: This would help your admission folks to use tasks more effectively.

Score Prospects on Engagement Activity

Your prospects generate a lot of data, but it’s hard to know what to do with it. Einstein analyzes your Pardot prospects’ activities to aggregate and grade their engagement, so you can focus on the people who mean the most to your business. Place the Einstein Scoring component on your prospect records to see granular, meaningful insights.

This change applies to Lightning Experience and is included with Pardot Advanced.

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.

Why this is important: 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. These are things which you need to keep track on flow builder.

If you are looking to build new flows, check the app exchange for pre built flow templates .
simple components like get records replacing fast lookup vs single record which will simplify your job.
instead of sobject it will be records in flow
only reason to go to flow designer is to enable rich text editor which will be built later.
use record collection variable with sobject variable.

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.

Why this is important: For institutions 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.

Why this is important: 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.

Watch a demo in action for Lighting for gmail features

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.

Why this is important: For institutions who use pardot, this is the most important reason on why you should sync campaigns from Salesforce to Pardot.

Verify Your Customer Communications with Email Draft Approval

Control the messaging between your agents using Lightning Experience and your customers to ensure that the content is as amazing as your company. Require that agents send email drafts to designated approvers when they’re communicating with customers. Previously, email draft approval for case emails was available only in Salesforce Classic.

How: Enable email drafts in Setup on the Support Settings page. Then configure a workflow process on the email message to define approval and rejection actions.

Why this is important: This would help marketing teams to verify branding on customer emails before allowing the admissions team to send emails to students.

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.

Why this is important: 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.

Why this is important: 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.

Why this is important: 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.

Why this is important: 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.

Why this is important: You can now preview your community on how anonymous users can see your community.

Translate Feed Items on the Spot

When your users have a common interest but not a common language, you can help. Use Community Builder’s new translation setting to put a Translate with Google menu on every feed item. Translate posts, questions, comments, answers, and replies. Over 50 languages are available to get people talking. Translations are offered through a Google Cloud Translation API key that you provide.

Why you should use this feature: For your international students , this feature can help them to colloborate using the language of their choice increasing engagement and adoption.

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.

Why this is important: For insittuions who are using a lot of forms, you can easily build them internally and have processes to assign the forms to 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.

Why this is important: 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.

Assign Default Home Pages Based on the Lightning App

Make sure that users see the Home page that’s most relevant to them by assigning default Home pages by app. The app default Home page overrides the org default Home page for users in the app. And if you create app-and-profile assignments, those Home pages assignments override all others.

Why this is important: This should help you to build separate home pages for admissions, marketing and advisor teams on your org.

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. You should train the users on pinned list views which would help your admissions and marketing team get to the right list immediatley.

2. If you are a gmail or outlook user, leverage your email templates to send emails to students on your favorite email tool.

3. Leverage lanaguage translation feature in your student communities to increase adoption for international students.

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. 😛