Service Cloud: Lightning Knowledge - Release Readiness LIVE Summer '17 | Salesforce

Hello and welcome to Salesforce Release Readiness Live. We're here to talk about all of the latest and greatest features in the service cloud for summer 17. And before we get started, just going to cover one last thing which is our forward looking statement because we're lucky to be joined by a panel of product managers. We might be discussing some future technologies, some roadmaps, some exciting features that are coming. Which means that it's important that Salesforce customers make all of your purchasing decisions based on currently available technologies. So that's our forward looking statement and without any further ado, I'd love to introduce our panel of product managers. Kicking it off to you Deborah.

Great, thank you so much. I'm Deborah Strusenberg here to share all the great features that are coming with Lightning Knowledge. Also ga in this release with all of Lightning service. So we have a lot to share and I'm looking forward to to sharing that with you. First I want to share the highlights of what we have coming in summer. So we have some really great features like the hover, we have the ability to customize record home. Both of those are things that I'll demo. We also have Lightning Knowledge is now compatible with the Nepele template in communities. So that was something that when we released in spring people were really anxious to see. So it's fully compatible now in the summer release we also have the ability to import articles with record types, which is our new data model. So I'll explain a little bit more about that in a minute. And also to import with files into the files object and related list, which is also new features. With that import capability now new customers can bring in Knowledge articles from other systems or somewhere else and have them configured appropriately for the new style of how we have things working for Lightning Knowledge, the new data model. Then finally we have compatibility with Salesforce one. So you can find Lightning Knowledge articles available from your phone. If you're out on the road, you need to get a quick answer. It's there. So I just want to get right into the demo if we can just switch over to that. I wanted to show features first and then we can talk about other things like the the data model and such. The first thing I wanted to show is that Knowledge in Classic you have two nodes when you come to your navigation. So first you would see knowledge and then you would also see article management. But you'll see that in Lightning we don't have that, we just have knowledge. And so this is one of the many ways that moving to Lightning we have really made knowledge much more standard. And it's a much more consistent experience using Knowledge in Lightning than it is in Classic. And that's our whole goal. With everything that we're doing to rebuild Knowledge in Lightning, you're going to see a lot more consistency and seamless kind of experience with knowledge. So you have this one node, you come to Knowledge, and you come to a standard listview object home. And that's the same as you saw with Case. You also have the same look and feel as other objects. So again, this is a new feature for Lightning only. We also have the ability to have list views. So list views is a huge new feature for Knowledge. We've never had that before, even though many other objects have. So this is one of those things that the work that we've done to build Lightning Knowledge has really brought forward capabilities in the platform that we haven't ever had before. So these are some default list views that we ship with the product. But you also have the ability to create your own, just like you would with any other object. So you can create new. And you can create a list view with fields, any fields on the record. Now, that doesn't mean related fields. Just to clarify, sometimes people ask, could I put the related case or related data categories? No, unfortunately not. That's just not how listviews work. But any fields that you've defined, any custom fields that you've defined or standard fields are available in your list view. Also, because we're using standard list views, you do have the ability to do split view, like what Gotham was showing before. So split view is also really great for knowledge because you can have your list and your record home right there. So just to look at record home, again, very standard look to record home for knowledge. This is a big difference because I know that our detail page in Classic is a very different look to it than most other objects. And it's very configurable, which is also a big difference for us. So you can configure the top here through the compact layout, you can decide what fields you want to show there. You can define your page layout and define all these fields that you want to see in the body. You can put sections in. The sections are collapsible. So if you want to have some information that's there and useful for maybe your authors, but maybe not as much for people that are reading it, you can either remove that information altogether from their view or you can just collapse it. Additionally, with defining your page layouts, you can now define page layouts per record. Type Record type is the new big difference in our data model in Lightning Knowledge from what we had in Classic where we used article types. So with record type functionality, it's standard record type functionality where you define page layouts per record type per user profile. So everybody can have, depending on their user profile, can have a different look to their page. They can have different actions available to them in the upper right hand corner and they can also have different related lists available on the related tab. So maybe this promoted search terms related list is only useful for your authors, so you could just remove that if you make a page layout for your PDF. People that use or read Knowledge articles, so it's very, very easy and declarative to do. You just drag and drop when you're defining your page layout. One other thing that I wanted to point out, I am actually on a published article, but if I go to my drafts here and I pick a draft article and come to my related list, the great functionality that Gotham. Oh, this one has one already. Let me get to one that doesn't. I want you to see the great functionality that Gotham was explaining that his team delivered on how to be able to drag and drop onto files. Now Knowledge is no longer. We don't have files and attachments in file fields like we do in Classic. We're using the standard files object and the standard files related list. And because we've made that move to have a much more standard approach and using components that other objects and other teams are using. When Gotham's team put in upload and drag and drop files, we just got that capability available in Knowledge. And that's something that customers have really been asking for. So thank you for that.

Yeah, Terra, I think there's perhaps something even more profound in what you're saying, because in Lightning, Knowledge is more like a first class Salesforce object than ever. And it gets to leverage all of those features and capabilities which it didn't have the opportunity for in Classic because it was on the article type paradigm versus the record type paradigm. One of those areas which is particularly exciting for me is the app builder experience for Knowledge.

I'll show that next.

Awesome.

Yeah, yeah. So thank you for this feature. And this is a testament to what we've done with standardizing. We did a lot of work for a couple releases where we were a little quieter. Didn't necessarily come to release readiness live, but we were doing this underlying work that Gotham's referring to, where we were moving from a very unique data model with article types to using record types and that work has made it possible for us to consume a lot of much more platform standard approaches, as you're seeing here, to how Knowledge will deliver all of our features. One of the other features that I'm really excited about that you were just mentioning, it was like you knew is one of the things that we've heard from customers a lot is that it's very difficult to configure the page in classic and you have to build a new VisualForce page and then any feature we roll out, you have to custom build it into your VisualForce page. And that can just be for the littlest, smallest thing in knowledge. It's been something that we've heard a lot of feedback from our customers. So I just want to flip over here to Setup for a minute. One thing also is knowledge setup is much more standard than it has been before. So when you go to Object Manager and you see all the objects, you have knowledge in there as well. And one of the great features that you have here is this lightning record pages so you can define your own record page. And the record page is what is available on the page that we were just looking at. On the detail page where you're viewing your article and all of the components. Just like you can with the console, you can configure the record page. So I'll just do this very quickly. The first thing is you decide if it's a record page and you move on to that. And we'll just say demo for here and we have all these objects so you can do this for many other objects, not just knowledge. And then you have all these templates that you can use to decide how do you want it to look. So, so maybe we want a left hand sidebar instead of the right hand sidebar that we were looking for. So you can just come in here and then it's telling you to just drag and drop. So maybe I want my votes component to show there and I want maybe my chatter feed to be over here and my record detail. It's this easy to configure your page and then you just save it and now you have a new page and you'll be able to assign that to user profiles to decide who sees what. So I highly recommend that people play around with this when they get a chance and an opportunity to try out Lightning Knowledge. This is one of the great new features that I'm really excited about because this means that now when we deliver features, we can deliver them as components. Our customers can customize their page and their experience you can build your own components, you can use components from partners or anyone else, but you don't have to miss out on the features that we're delivering in all of the components that we're building too, because you needed to customize for something that was important to your business. So I'm really excited about this feature and I have one more to show you.

I was going to say that it's been a journey for knowledge and recently I had a customer ask me that, can we leverage some of this goodness in Classic? And this is something that is tied with Lightning only real capabilities that you want to move to Lightning for this level of customization with Knowledge is just not something that we can achieve in Classic today.

The one thing I will say about that, because I do get that question a lot, is if somebody is using a classic console and they just want to be able to get to their articles in the sidebar, they actually can make the switch. It is a backend data model switch to move to Lightning Knowledge. So it's a little harder configuration than it is to go to the console. But once they've done that back end data model change, most of the features are optimized for Lightning. So the files, being able to use files and files object and drag and drop and being able to customize the page, that's definitely hashtag onlyenlightning. But being able to come back to a classic console and just read articles is still available. So that's really important if the organization wants to make the move to Lightning in phases. And so they have maybe one group is still in the classic console and they want to still be able to get to their articles. They will be able to still view them there. They will actually even be able to edit them, but there will be some limitations.

Got it.

Thanks. Thanks for the question on that. So just one final thing to show that Gotham started to show and then he didn't explain it. So I'm happy to take it.

Yeah, I didn't want to steal your time though.

Thank you. I appreciate it. This is one of my favorite features because we've been working on it, we've wanted to do it for a very long time. So when you're in the console, you're in the context of a case. You want to search for your articles, you have suggested articles and you want to just go through them quickly and see if they're going to work for the case. Now you can just hover over the article. Whoa, that's magic. Yeah. And you can scroll down and read it. You have actions here so you could edit it or archive it anyway. The hover capability is one of my favorite new features because it just means that you can stay within the context of your case. You can look through your articles very quickly. You don't have to open too many tabs. You can still open tabs, you can still click it and open a tab if you want to preserve that. Or you can still look at the history component. But it's just a way for people to really quickly find the article they want and decide what to do with it. So just to cover the roadmap, we have summer features we talked about already. In winter we are going to be introducing the first first part of supporting translated articles. This has been a big ask for many customers that are multi language. So right now if you're trying to enable Lightning knowledge and you have multi language enabled, you cannot enable Lightning knowledge. So we will start in winter with being able to read articles in Lightning. You'd still have to go back to classic to manage the translations and to create new translations, but you'll be able to read translated articles within Lightning and then in future releases. As you can see in the future part, we'll bring the manage capabilities into Lightning as well. We are also building a migration tool. The closed pilot is very, very closed pilot in winter. I just will say that it's really for proofpoint to make sure that we're building in the right way. I would look for for the spring release and beyond to be really when people will want to use the migration tool and that will help people move from the article type data model that we have today and be able to then move to record types and move the files from the file fields to the files object. We have a lot of other really great features coming and I just want to be mindful of time.

Well that was a wonderful demo. I mean it's really exciting especially for our admins out there who are who are managing knowledge and managing record or many object types to be able to work with knowledge the same way they're used to working with other objects. So really exciting. I do know we want to show more about service cloud so maybe let's take one or two questions and we'll come back to more questions at the end when we have time.

Okay, rapid fire here. So definitely the biggest excitement is around the record types and knowledge is GA in summer, is that correct?

It is GA.

So lightning knowledge I should say. And Alfred says OMG thank you for record types and three exclamation points.

Oh good, good.

Cloudy agrees 100%. There's also lots of interest in the drag and drop file functionality and in particular using other use cases for it. So if you know of any other use cases, if you know, is it limited to service Cloud or is that drag and drop available in other parts of Lightning, say Sales or.

Right. So great question. Any files related list now on any Salesforce object is drag and Drop capable. And one question in particular that we get asked is what if I'm uploading multiple files and there is an error? We actually handle that gracefully in the sense that we will upload all of the files that we can and for the single file where there is a conflict with, we will stop the process for that file individually. So just a little bit of nuance to know that not only is it single file for every Salesforce object, it's also you can do multiple file attachments to drag and drop at the same time.

So you talked about maybe using a hybrid of Classic and Lightning. So can you just describe again how you might be able to have users using Knowledge in both Classic and Lightning and what are the use cases for that?

Sure. So I would say, you know, the way that that would work is that they would first have to be able to move to Lightning and that there are specific criteria that need to be kept in mind to decide if somebody can move to Lightning. For example, right now, currently we're not supporting multi language organizations, but that will be coming starting in winter, phased approach through the next couple releases. So if they're ready, if they look at it and realize, okay, for the most part the features that we need are fine. I don't really need to migrate. Maybe I'm a new customer or I have minimal need for migration. I didn't have multiple article types and they can enable Lightning now, then what would happen is you would enable Lightning Knowledge and then all of the features that I demoed would be available in Lightning. And then switching back and forth between Lightning and Classic is very easy. You just kind of go in the upper right hand corner and switch back and forth. Any user can do that. That's it's not blocked. Right. I think anybody can switch back and forth between Classic and Lightning. So they would just. Whoever is still working in Classic would continue to work there. They will see some subtle differences between Lightning and Classic. So when they're back in Classic now, but Lightning Knowledge, the back end data model change has been made. It's a little confusing, I know, but when the back end data model of Lightning Knowledge has been enabled and they're working. In Classic, the they will no longer be able to filter a search by article type because there's no more article types. And the files if they had file attachments in ClassIQ, they wouldn't see the files object now and any related files that are added there. So those are just a couple of differences, but for the most part they could continue to author an article In Article Management, they can continue to actually edit them there, they can see them in the sidebar in the Classic console, they can search for them and still attach them to case and do all of that, so the rest of the functionality will be preserved. In Classic, there's just a few subtle differences.