It is new year time, so another Spring release of Salesforce. The Sandbox Preview window for Spring ‘18 is scheduled to begin January 5, 2018.
I have gone through the huge release notes and providing you the highlights of the release categorizing them into Lightning Experience features, Report Builder and Dashboard Enhancements.
Here are the Lightning Experience Features
1. Enable the New URL Format for Lightning Experience and the Salesforce Mobile App (Critical Update)
For example:
- Current format: https:// /one/one.app/#/sObject/Account/home
- New format: https:///lightning/o/Account/home
Custom or installed Lightning components that parse a URL may break or behave differently after this change, especially components with logic that relies on window.location or the aura:locationChange event.
2. Themes
From Setup, enter Themes and Branding in the Quick Find box, then select Themes and Branding. You can view, preview, and activate an existing theme or click New Theme to create your own.
3. Manage Your Views with Temporary Tabs
Use temporary tabs to access important items directly from the navigation bar. For example, open a frequently used dashboard in a temporary tab to access it instantly from anywhere.
Temporary tabs are also a great way to manage items that aren’t in your current app. For example, let’s say you open an item from the App Launcher, from your favorites list, or from a link. If it’s not already accessible from the navigation bar, the item opens as a temporary tab where it’s in easy reach.
4. Stay on Top of Duplicate Records by Using Duplicate Jobs
You’ve got everything to gain by getting a global view of duplicate records. Use duplicate jobs with standard or custom matching rules to scan your Salesforce business or person accounts, contacts, or leads for duplicates. Share job results with others and merge the duplicates—all within Salesforce. Use information about duplicate jobs you’ve run to track your progress in reducing duplicate records.
You can cancel the job in progress. When a job is finished, we notify you by email. To view and manage job results, click a duplicate job name and then a duplicate record set name. Click the Related tab. To share the results of duplicate jobs, create reports. To merge records in a set, on the job summary page, select Compare and Merge.
5. Control How Lead Conversion Includes Opportunities
6. Add Campaign Members Faster
Previously, when users added leads, contacts, or person accounts, they were sent to the Leads or Contacts home pages, taking them away from the campaign details. Now, a window displays the Recently Used list view. ClickAdd Contacts to add person accounts.
7. Path: Pick Your Own Path
8. Share Credit for a Deal in Lightning Experience
Add or adjust splits from the Opportunity Splits related list. The opportunity’s owner gets 100% until other splits are added. The opportunity’s owner or users above the owner in your hierarchy can add and adjust splits.
9. Customizable Add Products SCreen
The Add Products interface now gives you more options for viewing long blocks of text, like product names and descriptions. Drag columns to widen them (1), hover over a product’s name to view the entire name (2), and set columns to wrap text or clip it (3).
9. a)Now custom actions are also available on Products
9. b) Add Products to Price Books Faster
No need to scroll forever–just search for products by name (1). Select one or more products (2) to add to the price book. Review and remove selected products (3) before continuing to the next page.
9. c) Add Account Team to Opportunity Team with Single Click
10. a) Enterprise Territory Management: See More Territory Information
Reps see which users are assigned to an account’s territories, just like in Salesforce Classic.
10. b) Report on Territory Opportunities
When creating, editing, or running an opportunity report, select My territories’ opportunities in the Show field to include the opportunities that belong to your territories.
11. Review How Many List Emails You Can Send
12. Fine-Tune Activity Reminders
13. Home: Do More with the Deals Component
Top Deals is now Key Deals. Your reps can filter the opportunities shown in the component to see all their deals, deals closing soon, and other helpful list views.
14. Include Related Fields and Other Objects in Component Visibility Rules
On record pages, you can select fields from the record by clicking Record Field. Or click Advanced to expand your field selections to related fields, related objects, or fields from other objects such as Client and User. WoW!
15. Make Your Lightning App and Home Pages Dynamic
16. Edit Lightning Apps with the Lightning App Builder
17. Employ Validation Rule Formulas with Custom Metadata Types
use a validation rule formula with custom metadata types.
- Create a custom metadata type. In this example, we named it DiscountLimits.
- Create a custom field for your type. We named it maxDiscount.
- Create a record. We named it FoodDiscount.
When done, you can reference the custom metadata type in your validation rule. The syntax is:
$CustomMetadata.CustomMetadataTypeAPIName.RecordAPIName.FieldAPIName
Make sure to use the correct suffixes. For the custom metadata type, use __mdt. For fields, use __c. Records require no suffix. Your validation rule for this example looks something like this:
Discount > $CustomMetadata.DiscountLimits__mdt.FoodDiscount.maxDiscount__c
18. Track Time with the Time Field Type (Beta)
To support using time in formulas, this beta release includes the TIMEVALUE and TIMENOW functions, as well as new HOUR, MINUTE,SECOND, and MILLISECOND functions.
19. Email Search has Finally Arrived
- Bcc Address, Cc Address, From, Address, Subject, Text Body, To Address.
- All custom fields of type text, text area, long text area, rich text area, email, and phone.
20. Upload Files Directly from a Flow
21. Generate Leads from LinkedIn
Add another source of leads for your sales team by connecting LinkedIn Lead Gen advertisements to Salesforce. When prospective customers fill out a form on your LinkedIn ad, we convert the data directly to new leads in Salesforce. This feature is new in both Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic.
22. Force.com Platform Is Now called Lightning Platform!
Salesforce is changing the name to Lightning Platform because, in the past 10 years, it’s become so much more. It will take some time to see every reference to Force.com removed from Salesforce product, but from here on out, it’s Lightning Platform.
sfdcFanBoy 
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