Upcoming Salesforce features to watch out for

IdeaExchange is one of my favourite part of Salesforce ecosystem. Yes, it does cause a lot of heartburn to see requests more than six years old idle away, but it ultimately gives customers a voice and a medium to influence the roadmap of the products.

In between release cycles I frequent IdeaExchange to understand what features are coming up in the near future and what are the things that people are talking about as of now. This primarily helps me get an idea on the kind of design directions I will need to take in the future. It also helps me get rid of my bind spots since IdeaExchange is used by people of varied industries, job profiles and skill levels. Hence, the perspectives you can get from such a community is unparalleled.

The third benefit is identifying some features that are currently in a beta that might help the people who use the instance I’m working on.

All that said, there are a few features that I’m really excited for and I’ve listed them in two sections — In development and Pilot / Beta. The latter is either available in your org or you can request a way to get into the pilot. The items that are still in development have a longer lead time, even though the PMs have mentioned a tentative release date on the ideas.

In development

Increase number of custom fields to 950

Don’t get over excited as yet as this idea is still in development and we do not know how many fields will be available in which edition. It’s possible that this increase might only reflect for customers on Unlimited edition. However the fact that this is under development itself is great news.
Link to the idea

Address field type

We knew this was coming for a while and having an option to create a custom address field set would make life very easy especially since capturing billing and shipping addresses in various contexts is a common business requirement.
Link to the idea

History tracking for activities

Wasn’t this task supposed to be completed last week? Who changed the status of this task? Who even made these changes? If you haven’t faced such questions from Salesforce users you’re lucky I haven’t been and that is the reason I am glad history tracking is coming to activities object.
Link to the idea

Queue support for opportunity

This one’s a double edged sword since opportunity ownership has a direct linkage to forecasting and if this is de-linked we would need to re-look at how the forecasting and sharing management works for opportunities all over again. Add in the complexities related to opportunity teams, sharing model and splits, this would if nothing else add new questions for people taking Platform App Builder exam in the future 🙂
Link to the idea

Payment gateway support for recurring payments

This is one of those “Huh!” items and will be extremely interesting for those using Non-Profit Starter Pack (NPSP) and an eye-brow raiser for any company that has made a payment gateway integration in Salesforce to support NPSP. Out of the box support for initiating recurring payments is a big deal and I wonder if any of that functionality will be available for CPQ customers as well. As of now, we can only speculate.
Link to the idea

Export reports to PDF

This is one requirement I see in so many RFPs I have to respond to with a negative. I’m glad to see that it is coming out finally, but I hope that there is an option to select landscape orientation and not hardcoded to a portrait orientation.
Link to the idea

In pilot

Image credit: Sašo Goričar