Salesforce Spring ‘21 Release Preview

Introduction
If you check your email regularly, you might have noticed a message from Salesforce about the upcoming Spring ‘21 Release. It seems like we’ve just upgraded to Winter and yet a new update is coming our way. Well, good for us!
Let’s take a look at some of the new features coming to Salesforce in the new Spring ‘21 Release.
Salesforce Meetings
Let’s start with a brand new studio. The Meeting Digest organizes and unifies information about upcoming events to help sales reps better prepare and engage attendees. Users get quick access to documents, Einstein insights, activities and attendees’ details. In times like these, the Meeting Studio is a great tool to help improve virtual events.
Improved Email Experience
Spring ‘21 Release is quite generous with its new features for Email. Let’s look at the ones that seem most interesting:
Track soft bounces. Previously, only hard bounces (permanent delivery failures) were tracked, but now users will be also able to check if the email wasn’t delivered because of temporary delivery failure.
Add Zoom meeting links to Events. By connecting their Zoom accounts, sales reps can automatically add Zoom links to invitations.
Use Lightning Email Templates in automations. Lightning templates are now available with all of your favorite automation tools, such as email alerts, Flows, Workflow, Process Builder, Approval Process, and more!
Distribute Lightning Email Templates with Change Sets. In addition to making lighting templates available in automations, we can now test them out in a sandbox environment before moving them to production.
Einstein Opportunity Scoring Available with Less Data
You can use the power of AI even if you have a smaller data set. Salesforce Einstein uses anonymous aggregated data to help you score your opportunities, and when enough data is gathered, it switches to a scoring model based solely on your own data.
Enhancements to the Salesforce Mobile App
There are several mobile app improvements that make using your mobile for Salesforce even more pleasant. They include: a new Salesforce home screen for iOS, activity timeline for Android, improved Lightning Page Performance, and more.
Click here to see the full list of enhancement to Mobile in the Salesforce Spring ‘21 Release.
Lightning Flow is now Salesforce Flow
Aside from the name change, there are some exciting updates to Flows:
Refer to the Prior Values of the Record That Triggered Your Flow. A very useful feature that brings more of Apex functionality into the Flow Builder. You can now directly refer to original values in Flow.
Run Part of a Record-Triggered Flow After the Triggering Event. Schedule a part of your flow to run at a specific time. This way, your record-triggered automation can run two paths - one that launches immediately and one that fires later on.
Send Rich Text Email from Your Flow. Just like the name suggests - we can finally send emails in rich text format by using the Send Email action. Create your email body as a text template and reference it in the Send Email action.
Control Values in Revisited Screens. Deciding if you should allow your users go back in a Screen Flow was usually a problematic issue. That’s why in the Salesforce Spring ‘21 Release we are getting an ability to choose in the screen configuration whether we want to use values from when the user last visited our screen or if the inputs should be refreshed. This will surely be a very useful feature.
Improved Styling for Flow Screen Components. Was I the only one annoyed by how uneven the fields were on the screens? Well, probably not, because the Salesforce Team decided to add a cohesive, coherent look that makes all components take up the full width of the container. Thank you very much Salesforce!
Improved Flow Debugging. Forget the long flow errors received by email. From now on, you will be able to access debug logs by clicking a link in the error email to open Flow Builder to see the failed flow interview’s path on the canvas. Can’t wait to try it!
Analyze Performance For Lightning Pages Viewed on a Phone
A useful tool to assess a record page’s performance for the phone form factor. You can view separate performance analysis for desktop and for mobile to better understand and improve your page.
Streamline Report Creation with Multi-Field Selection
A small, but welcomed feature to improve the time needed to create reports. Now you can drag multiple fields to your reports at once. Reports & Dashboards Administrator will love it.
Conclusion
As always, this is just a tip of the iceberg. There are many other new features coming not just to Sales Cloud or Flow, but to Service, Development, High Velocity Sales and other Salesforce products as well. Make sure to check the full documentation on the Salesforce Spring ‘21 Release to prepare your organization for when it gets the update.
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