Dreamforce, Salesforce’s annual user conference, merits a number of key values—the rare opportunity to rub shoulders with 170,000 other Salesforce users in a downtown San Francisco five-block radius, an annual setting for the CRM giant to trumpet another year of innovation and growth to key groups of analysts, and a showcase of features, products, and ideas from all corners of the Salesforce ecosystem. For the four of us attending from Altvia, Dreamforce provided time and space to reflect on the platform’s direction and to brainstorm about new ways to continue weaving Salesforce into the core of Altvia Care and our product suite.
Mobile & AI Developments
Many a session focused on the newly announced strategic partnership between Salesforce and Apple, a catalyst for a number of initiatives related to the Salesforce mobile app. The revamped mobile interface Salesforce will be rolling out in the coming months will allow us to deliver an AIM experience tailored specifically for mobile users, complete with, among other features, customized push notifications and mobile-specific components. As an example, one use case would be allowing users to use an address stored on a Contact or Account in AIM to order a Lyft.
Einstein Voice marries Salesforce’s native AI tool with virtual assistants like Siri to allow users to conversationally update AIM records, parsing information such as verbally logged meeting notes into updated fields and records. Stay tuned in 2019 for a refreshed AIM mobile app combining these new features with additional enhancements we’re developing here at Altvia.
What You Can Do In Lightning Now
Keynote after keynote emphasized Salesforce’s push toward a fully Lightning-ified customer base (haven’t made the switch yet yourself? Check out why we think you should. Their Lightning team has already rolled out a number of features to entice Classic users to switch over and to improve the experience of users at organizations that have already transitioned.
Don’t love the additional white space that comes along with the Lightning Experience? Salesforce rolled out a compact density setting that fits more data into a single screen, which our support team would be happy to help you get set up. The new enhanced run page for reports allows users to users to select a few groupings from summary and matrix reports and drill further into that specific data. For example, if you had a report of deals grouped by deal team member coverage, you’d be able to use the drill down feature to zoom into a particular team member’s deals on a row-by-row basis while maintaining a summary-level look into the entire deal pipeline.
Lightning Enhancements On The Horizon
Salesforce’s pipeline for the Lightning Experience includes fan favorites like printable records and listviews, the ability to default a given tab to a listview other than Recently Viewed, and a consolidation of the Lightning Page and Page Layout editors. The final item in that list will (finally!) allow us to easily display only the relevant fields for a given stage on your Deal, Pipeline, or Fundraising records. No more daunting lists of empty fields for your users—this and other innovations will allow us to provide a more streamlined user experience across our product suite.
MyTrailhead
Additionally, in the coming year, Salesforce will also invest significantly into its guided learning community, Trailhead. Rolling out in 2019, myTrailhead will allow partners to write custom content in Salesforce’s bite-size Trailhead modules, allowing new joiners at our clients’ firms to skill up on Altvia products conveniently and at their own pace. Anyone in need of a refresher on any corner of the Altvia suite, from AIM to ShareSecure to AIM Inbox, will be able to log in to a portal full of educational content. Additionally, system administrators will be granted the ability to assign other users badges or trails to complete by a specific date, increasing accountability around self-study.
If you’ve thought of ideas or innovations for our product suite, we’d love to hear what you have to say! Please contact our Product Team to connect.