Happy New Year! Whether you are on Salesforce Lightning or still on Classic the New Spring ’17 Release has plenty to offer.  Todays blog Post will discuss my top 5 upcoming features.

Disclaimer: The features discussed here today are still not yet generally available. There is no guarantee that these features will become general available and can be moved to a future release or removed completely.

Number 1: Sales Cloud Einstein is here

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has taken over sales. With Sales Cloud Einstein, you harness the power of a team of Data Science for a fraction of  the price. Whether it’s identifying the best leads, converting new opportunity timely and more efficiently or customer retention let Einstein help every step of the way. It’s only available via the Lightning Experience.

Additional Resource

Set Up Sales Cloud Einstein

• Setting up Sales Cloud Einstein is easy, just use the in-app Einstein Setup Assistant as a guide. You choose who can use Einstein, what  features to enable, and configure pages as well as list views so sales reps can see insights.

Trailhead: Get Smart with Salesforce Einstein

• Learning about AI and how it can transform your CRM with smart predictions, intelligent recommendations, and timely automation.

 Number 2: Critical Update Activates in Spring ’17

Released in Summer ’16, “Trust Percent Values in Flow sObject Variables Again” critical update was scheduled for auto-activation in Winter ’17, but has been postponed to this release.

Sounds great, but what exactly does the Critical Update fix? Well lets recap.

Previously calculations on percent values weren’t always working as expected. The recommended workaround was to multiply the sObject percent field values by 100. This critical update lets you remove the workaround for percent calculations on flows. The table below shows the expectations for percent values after the critical update is activated.

¹If you’re saving this value to a new or existing Salesforce record, we recommend multiplying it by 100.

 Number 3: Prevent Spammers with reCAPTCHA on Web-to-Case

Tired of spammers hijacking you forms and leaving you with Cases that make absolutely no sense. Now you can add reCAPTCHA to your Web-to-Case form to combat spam while still allowing seamless contact with a company’s customers. The reCAPTCHA widget will add a required checkbox that will have to select in order to create a case.  Now customer service agents can focus on resolving real cases and not have spam cases.This minor change made a major impact and will be available in both Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic.

Number 4: Live Comments Are Better Than Ever

Now Users can see real time when people are commenting as well as up to three simultaneous users typing. Real-time comments first went Generally Available in Winter ’17, but alas this feature, like it’s update, is Lightning only. However not having to refresh the page to see new comment has been a great achievement for chatter. Being able to distinguish new comment with the yellow highlighting and being able to subscribe to comment has made huge leaps and bounds. Coupled with this new update, no longer will you have to wait in anticipation for each new comment now you will have better visibility.

Number 5: No more multi Test Setup Methods

In previous releases, developers were able to create multiple test setup methods per class. Alast it was not meant to be. Now you will only be allowed one test setup method per class. Any test that have more than one will issue a compile-time exception and will have to be fixed in order to pass.