Salesforce.com Announces New Lightning Features

Salesforce.com today announced a number of new features for Salesforce Lightning, features that the company say were designed with a “human-first” approach to provide users with better ways to interact with customers.

Hightlighting that approach is Lightning Console Apps, which enables Salesforce admins (which the company defines as business leaders who are “deeply knowledgeable about how their company operates, intertwined in making all departments successful through process automations, and thus integral to running a smooth and lean business”) to quickly create custom, high-productivity apps.

“The thing that we want to highlight here is that you can create custom console apps on any object in Salesforce,” says Ben Pruden, director of product marketing at Salesforce, of Lightning Console Apps. “It doesn’t have to be sales or service: If you have a process for managing HR leads—if your HR team is following up with people—or if you have an internal help-desk-ticket system, you can leverage the super-high-productivity workspace of Console Apps to help any of those teams get their work done faster.”

Other new tools include Split View for Lightning Console and Lightning Dialer Enhancements. Split View for Lightning Console enables users to open multiple records—like leads, accounts, contacts, and opportunities—at once and take action directly from the Lightning Console. Lightning Dialer Enhancements builds upon the spring 2017 release of Lightning Dialer with call lists that allow users to prioritize activities as they work and a voicemail drop feature that enables them to prerecord voicemails.

Rounding out the new features are Einstein Powered Search, Path and Kanban, and Lightning Report Builder. Einstein Powered Search brings type-ahead, pre-scoping, and spell correction capabilities to search. The Path (a component used to guide sales reps through the stages of the sales process) and Kanban (a visual summary for a selection of records) capabilities are available across nearly every object, as well as any pipeline or organizational workflow. The Lightning Report Builder, which is currently in pilot, looks to enable users to quickly and easily add new fields, groupings, and matrix summary reports. 

“The key thing is that with Lightning and of course all Salesforce products we wanted to make it really intuitive and natural for the way that you interact and get things done when you’re working,” Pruden says. “Lightning is really three things: a super-productive experience for every Salesforce user; a component-based framework for seamlessly creating customized experiences in Salesforce, and an ecosystem of best-in-class apps and components that help everyone accelerate success across any business process.”

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