With Summer ‘15 preview in sandboxes and the production release around the corner, it’s a great time to dive into some of the key features we’ve been waiting for!
Let’s look at 5 new features that will make your system administration a little easier so you can kick back and enjoy summer.
Match Production Licenses to Your Sandbox Without a Refresh
Have you ever started working on a project in a sandbox that was refreshed prior to new licenses being provisioned in production and had to come up with a crafty way to continue on your project trajectory without a refresh or the required licenses enabled in the test environment? Fear this scenario no more, with Summer ’15 you can now match your sandbox instance with the provisioned licenses in production without a refresh or contacting salesforce.com to pull some strings for you. Matching production licenses will update sandbox license counts to production, add licenses that are in production but not in sandbox, and remove licenses that are not in production. This new feature will ultimately save you time if new or more licenses are critical to your build and testing prior to go-live.
Report Management for Partner and Customer Users—Create and Edit Reports
Report management for partner and customer Community Cloud users will get a little easier with Summer ‘15. When it comes to exposing partner and customer reports in a Community, the business and administrators need to do a lot of thinking and preparing to get those users reports they may need or want. With Summer ’15 you can now set partner and customers up with a handful of useful reports and grant them the ability to create and edit reports with the drag-and-drop Report Builder as-needed for their own personal consumption. You can grant partner and customer users permission to create and edit reports through profiles or permission sets. This means you can give many partner and customer users this capability or assign it on an as-needed basis.
Data visibility is driven by the same things as always: the profile’s object permissions, account role the partner or customer belongs to, and your organization’s sharing rules. Field-level security is respected as it is with internal users; if a field is not visible for a profile, a partner or customer user won’t see it in the Report Builder. Before you grant external Community users access to create and edit reports, an assessment of your security model and field level security may be valuable to ensure you do not expose sensitive information. 
Emails Sent for Approval Requests, Workflow Alerts, and Cases Now Include a Link to the Community
Anyone who has set up email alerts and templates for Community users where the {!<any_object>.Link} is used knows that the same email template, and therefore, alert cannot be used if a Community user is a recipient. If not already logged into the Community when clicked, the link will take the external user to the internal login page, login.salesforce.com, instead of the Community’s login page. To get around this, administrators had to set up a “custom” URL to include in the email template. If a Community user and an internal user were to be the recipient of the same email, one email template and alert needed to be set up for internal users and another for the external Community user. In Summer ’15 the {!<any_object>.Link} will now recognize who it’s being sent to, internal vs. Community user, and will input the correct URL prefix to the record ID. I cannot be more excited for this feature!
Partner Users Can Now Read, Create, and Edit Campaigns
Have you ever wanted to grant Partner Community users the ability to create and manage marketing campaigns from Marketing Development Fund (MDF) requests directly in your instance? If so, you likely have a custom solution that manages this 
process as an automated sub-process of MDF, that after the MDF request has been approved, a campaign is automatically created in Salesforce where leads from the MDF activity can be linked to the campaign and registered as a deal later to prove the ROI for those MDF dollars.
You can now assign users with a Partner Community license “read,” “create,” and “edit” permissions on campaigns. Previously, partner users could only read campaigns.
A Partner user with the “Marketing User” permission and “create” and “edit” permissions can:
- Search for and add their contact or leads as campaign members, removing a step from the internal user’s workload
- Access (and now create & edit) reports on their campaigns
- Use Salesforce to mass-email and mass-assign their contacts and leads on a campaign with email templates you have pre-defined
Tasks that were once the responsibility of automation, system administrators, or marketing managers can now be placed on the partner to perform and close the loop on.
Enable Case and Lead Assignment Rules More Intuitively
It was once an obstacle for administrators to overcome when trying to enforce Case and Lead Assignment Rules for cases and leads created through the UI. In releases prior to Summer ’15, the Case/Lead Assignment Checkbox settings of “Show on edit page” and “Default” were dependent on one another in certain scenarios. This means that you could “Show…” the “Assign using active assignment rule” “…on edit page” and chose to have it “Default” checked or not, but you could not make the “Assign using active assignment rules” Default checked without showing the Assign using active assignment rule checkbox on edit page. While this is usually fine for internal users, in Partner and Customer Communities there is always the risk that the partner or customer unchecked this box and when they saved their lead or case, respectively, they would remain the owner and the record wouldn’t get routed to the proper handler. The checkbox could be hidden with CSS but it was extra effort and needed the proper resource to do so.
Post Summer ’15, the Lead Assignment Checkbox options will respect both the “Default” setting and the “Show on edit page” checkbox independently. You can now force assignment rules by selecting “Default,” and with little effort, users won’t see the option to turn off the assignment when creating or editing a lead or case record.
The Future Is Not Far Off
The Summer ’15 release is full of enhancements for improving the efficacy of your administrator or Salesforce consulting partner so they can sit back and relax and enjoy the Summer. Click here to see when you will start seeing Summer ’15 changes in your Salesforce instance. If you’re behind a release, check out some highlights from the Spring ’15 release.
