It’s only January, but Salesforce has already published its Spring ’16 Release Notes. In order to provide better business capabilities, Salesforce has improved various features.

Lightning Experience.

Currently, Lightning Experience is all about its beautiful, new, user experience. Unfortunately, this Spring ’16 (as well as Winter ’16) Release does not support all the features that are already available in Salesforce Classic. Many Salesforce customers are so impressed by Lightning’s publicity campaign that they forget about the limitations – some functionality, critical for business, is limited or unavailable in Lightning Experience.

Sales.

The Spring ’16 Release will bring more campaigns and opportunities for sales teams. One of the features that should be mentioned is integration with Microsoft®. Salesforce presents its app for Outlook that allows you to work without having to switch between Microsoft apps and Salesforce.

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With the mobile version of Salesforce, it’s easy to do business on the run. Advantages: interactive charts, objects keep track of purchased products, Salesforce Authenticator mobile app with two-factor authentication for strong protection.

Communities.

The most anticipated component of the Spring ’16 Release. The first thing to do is to upgrade your templates to the latest version – Winter ’16.

Long story short: some of the template components were renamed to make finding them easier. For those who used to know the old names, it’s time to start learning new ones! Hint: components are grouped by type in Page Editor.Chatter Lightning components allow you to use the full Chatter capabilities for a community. Templates in the Spring ’16 Release will support multiple languages, plus users will be able to vote on knowledge articles and see more options for the case detail page. Community Builder will please users with Page Manager – it’s an enhanced tool for creating/deleting pages, adding page variations and viewing page properties. Community managers will be happy too – there’s support for all feed types and special characters. Also, a community manager can now set up file limits for a community and specify recommendations for targeting specific audiences.

Chatter.

With the new Release, users will be able to create broadcast groups, supply users and groups with banner photos, and edit posts (as well as adding links and attaching files).

Another chapter of the Spring ’16 Release is Marketing Cloud. It’s not just a set of improved features, but a whole platform that will delight marketing managers. With Marketing Cloud from Salesforce, users can have a single view of customer-leveraging data from any source. Now marketers can deliver personalised content to their customers via any device at exactly the right time.

That’s not everything in the Spring ’16 Release, but only the most interesting points. It looks quite impressive, right? That’s why it’s important to understand that these features are just planned, but not yet implemented. Salesforce is a highly effective business with publicity campaigns that help it a lot. However, remember that according to its Safe Harbor document, Salesforce cannot guarantee that any mentioned features will be generally available at some particular time, or at all.

To all current and future Salesforce customers – be patient, be critical of exciting announcements and keep your mind clear.