Salesforce Summer ’21 release highlights

The Salesforce summer ’21 release arrived on May 14th, June 4th, and the 11th of June in the different regions. Let’s take a look at some of the most exciting features of the newest edition of Salesforce upgrades.

New Flow updates

If you stay up to date with every Salesforce release, you know that we can always count on new Flow updates. Every administrator and developer will appreciate these smart, powerful and time-saving enhancements when using Flow.

The Flow Builder now allows the creation of Multicolumn Screens to achieve a more engaging and visually attractive layout. You will be able to easily divide Flow screens into sections and columns: no code is needed. Best of all these columns are responsive, stack vertically and you can use the Section component to create columns, select widths and determine visibility. These new options provide a much cleaner interface and enhanced user experience.

There is also great news for non-Apex users who want to gain more options for data visibility and organization. Now Flow allows prioritizing and limiting gathered data with a new Collection sort element. It lets users choose a specific variable, limit the number of elements in the collection, sort it in an ascending or descending order and even select the number of items kept after sorting. This means that it will be easier for users to arrange, and iterate through data.

Another advancement that will save your time and help find your failed flows quicker is Failed Flow Interviews list view, where you can access every Failed Flow Interview in one place without the need to refer to flow error emails. You get a list of all paused and failed flow interviews with clear status and date for all flow types. The list view also includes useful controls such as sharing settings and select fields to display.

These are just a few of the many amazing Flow improvements, as with every cycle of Salesforce release its efficiency and the overall user experience improve. To learn more about how you can use these functionalities to your advantage or explore other new Flow components, we will be delighted to walk you through these new features within the context of your platform.

Gain quick access with Dynamic Actions Bar

Time is priceless for all Salesforce users. Lightning App builder offers a useful Dynamic Actions Bar to help you access your most important actions as soon as the interface loads. This flexible app page component allows you to add both your standard and custom global actions as well as set visibility filters to immediately access the most used functionalities. Simply put, you can adjust the bar to your specific needs. Currently, this option is only available to selected users, but hopefully soon everyone will be able to enjoy the convenience of this feature.

Drive sales with Pipeline Inspection

If you want to empower your sales managers and drive sales team accountability, you will be excited to learn about the Pipeline Inspection. This fantastic tool provides a unified view into the key metrics, opportunities and weekly changes in close dates, amounts, stages, and forecast categories to effortlessly pinpoint areas that need improvement or immediate actions. Managers get the full picture of the pipeline, stay on top of team performance and draw valuable insights. As a result, they can adjust their strategy, motivate team members and get better results. In reality, it also makes the job of the entire sales team easier. They can filter the view by needed criteria (time period, sales rep, team, etc.) and instantly see matching opportunities to immediately focus on closing the most important or time-sensitive deals.

Connect with customers through Native Sales Navigator Integration for LinkedIn

Salesforce understands the value of connecting with your customers in the most effective and personable way. Now it introduces a native integration with LinkedIn Sales Navigator (previously available exclusively as an AppExchange app) to help you achieve better sales results. In effect, sales reps can see LinkedIn profiles on lead, contact, opportunity, and account pages and instantly send InMails and connection requests using native Lightning actions. Additionally, everything can be overseen by sales managers, who can include this data in High Velocity Sales cadences. This is a perfect tool to help companies reach as many prospects as possible in a convenient and time-saving way.

Act quickly with Mass action in Split View

Salesforce users are multitaskers and often need to work on multiple records at once. Now it is possible with Split View. Although it has been a part of Standard Navigation for a year now, when it came to mass action, you had to open a separate page of List View. This is no longer a problem. The process is pretty straightforward – simply select items in the Split View list and choose an action from the dropdown menu. This is a great time-saver for all administrators.

Improve the quality of your reports with inline editing

Keeping reports up to date has never been so easy and quick as with a new streamlined process. With the Report inline editing tool, users don’t need to go back to the original object record to update report information when the source data gets out of date. Instead, they can change types of text, numeric, and checkbox fields and it all can be done effortlessly from the report run page.

Regular report updates are very important to ensure data order and integrity. This new hassle-free method makes this process much more user-friendly.

However, there are some exceptions. Inline editing isn’t supported for these fields and field types:

• Task and event object fields
• System fields such as Record ID and Created Date
• Compound fields, including name and address fields
• Picklists
• Custom date/time fields
• Encrypted text fields
• Formula fields
• Standard fields of type date/time, auto number, roll-up summary, record type, master-detail, long text area, rich text, or hierarchy
• Other fields where editing isn’t permitted due to restrictions in the page layout or record type

Inline editing for reports is currently only available in Lightning Experience as a Beta feature.

Are you excited for the Salesforce Summer ’21 Release?

As always, Salesforce has a lot more in store for its users and these are just some of the new improvements. If you would like to configure any of the new Summer Salesforce releases, but don’t know where to start, do not hesitate to reach out. We have helped many of our clients with new updates and our expert team will be more than happy to provide recommendations and support.

Get in touch to explore great opportunities of these new additions.

Mark Hartnady
Head of Architecture
VRP Consulting UK

About the Author

Mark Hartnady is one of our global architecture leaders, based in our London office. Mark has been working with CRM solutions, with particular focus on the Salesforce platform since 2012 and has been instrumental in transforming enterprises with scalable, extensible solutions in the manufacturing, automotive, hi-tech and media sectors.