Salesforce Summer ‘16 Release Highlights For Higher Ed and Nonprofits

Three times a year, Salesforce.com offers major releases with hundreds of new features and enhancements — ultimately allowing organizations to connect to their customers in a whole new way. Summer ‘16 brought many new and exciting features that are relevant to Higher Ed Institutions and Nonprofits of all sizes, and we want you to be in the know!

Here are the highlights:

Improvement to the Lightning Experience

The Lightning Experience is a modern and intelligent user experience across every device. There are various improvements to the Lightning experience including (view all new features):

• Email Composer: Emails sent from the Lightning Experience Email Composer will automatically create Email Message records. If you do not wish to have a richer email experience, just disable the “Enhanced Email” setting in “Setup.”
• Calendar: With Lightning Calendar, you can now see any Salesforce object in a Lightning Calendar. Objects that are date-only, like campaigns, show up in the all-day section.

Process Builder Improvements

It’s now even easier for admins to automate business processes and data movement inside Salesforce without needing any coding skills. With this release, processes can execute actions on more than one true criteria.

Global & Restricted Picklists (Beta)

Now in Beta, global picklists let you efficiently reuse a single list of values for multiple custom picklist fields. Easily share picklists across objects by creating picklist fields that use a picklist value set from a global picklist. And because global picklists are always restricted, your picklist data stays clean because users can’t add erroneous or redundant values through the API. This feature is available in both Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic.

Chatter Improvements

• Chatter Mute: Users can mute any post in Salesforce Classic. The mute action is available in the drop down action menu, and it prevents any further email or Salesforce1 push notifications unless the user is explicitly mentioned in a comment
• Chatter Email Announcements (Beta): Email announcements are sent to all Group members regardless of their email settings. This capability is controlled by a user permission and should be given out carefully.

NPSP Releases Highlights

The Nonprofit Starter Pack (NPSP) is an easy-to-use fundraising and constituent management application on the Salesforce Platform designed to configure Salesforce out of the box for Nonprofits.

Highlights from Summer ‘16 Releases include:

• Lightning Experience: The Managed Household Page is available in the Lightning Experience (coming very soon)
• Localized in Spanish: NPSP is now available in Spanish, just switch your user setting to Spanish
• Various bug fixes to the Data Import tool
• Salesforce.org has released a comprehensive upgrade to NPSP 3 workbook. If you are looking to upgrade, check it out.

HEDA Releases Highlights

The Higher Education Data Architecture (HEDA) is a community-driven data architecture and set of best practices designed to configure Salesforce out of the box for Higher Ed.

Since its launch on March 1st, Salesforce.org has seen great momentum, including:

• Over 300 Downloads from AppExchange
• 50+ Production orgs with HEDA
• 300+ Power of Us Hub members

Power of Us Community Hub Release Highlights

The Power of Us Hub Community is a community of over 25,000 members passionate about Salesforce. Recently, Salesforce.org launched Power of Us Ideas – a way for Salesforce users to submit and vote on feature and functionality requests for all Salesforce.org products.

Release Like a Pro

Be an #awesomeadmin by developing your release strategy. We recommend a three step process:

1. Plan it out: Review available resources, log changes to existing processes or experiences, and review feature timing and new solutions.
2. Make it happen: Test in your sandbox then implement in your production org.
3. Share it: Review documentation, release highlights and training and share the information with others. Trailhead has made it even easier with the Summer ‘16 Release Trail. Get your release prep badge!

If you’re interested in learning more, find out what’s in the entire Summer ‘16 release and check out a recording of the Higher Ed & Nonprofit Highlights of Spring ’16 Releases Webinar to find out more about what’s in the entire release.

Watch Webinar Recording