Clicks over code, live data, and UI optimizations: Previewing Einstein Analytics’ Spring 2020 release
Early spring brings new features for Einstein Analytics as part of Salesforce’s Spring ‘20 release. Here’s a quick preview of what’s coming soon.
To celebrate the new year, the next Salesforce release preview is here! This year, the Spring ‘20 preview release dates for Sandboxes are the 3rd and 4th of January. If you’re interested in learning more about the preview timings and want to ensure that you will see the new features in your sandbox, check out the Salesforce blog post here. Spring ‘20 will be released on February 14th and 15th, depending on your instance of Salesforce.
The Spring ‘20 release documentation is 528 pages long, so it’s understandable that most Salesforce practitioners won’t be able to read all the notes before the preview arrives. To help dig into the new features and determine what they mean for customers, I developed this quick guide detailing a few of my favorite Einstein Analytics-specific highlights of the release, from improvements to data to UI to clicks not code.
Work with more data from more places
In this release, there are several notable improvements to the data side of Einstein Analytics. For customers with Einstein Analytics Plus licenses, the maximum row limit for all datasets will be increased tenfold, to 10 billion rows. For those using the Mulesoft integration platform, Salesforce is introducing Analytics Mulesoft connectors to extract cloud-based data into Einstein Analytics using clicks, not code. There’s also going to be a new OAuth 2.0 connector to sync Marketing Cloud data. All of these new connectors and limits will make it easier to work with larger, more diverse data sets.
Explore Salesforce data without datasets
With Salesforce Direct Data, now users can explore Salesforce data without setting up data sync or completing data prep. If data changes often enough that the option of scheduled data flows doesn’t work for the use cases, Direct Data allows you to query Salesforce objects in the dashboard designer’s explorer. To keep dashboard performance up, datasets should still be the preferred route in all other scenarios; querying too much live data will hurt the user experience. This feature could also be useful when doing proofs of concepts before editing or adding a data flow.
Create interactions (fka bindings) with the Advanced Interaction Editor
With the rebranding of bindings to “interactions” (which makes a lot of sense to me), Einstein Analytics is getting an Advanced Interaction Editor to help dashboard builders create interactions with clicks. You can use it to create multiple interactions for the same widget or query (1, 2, 3), preview the results (4, 5), and insert the interactions (6, 7) all from the new editor.
Specify targeted faceting without code
There seems to be a trend in this release to create more opportunities to do advanced customization without code, which will make Einstein Analytics much more usable for non-technical dashboard builders. To continue on this path, dashboard builders will be able to include/exclude certain widgets from facets without having to use code. In the query panel for the facet, you’ll be able to select All, Include, Exclude, or None. This will make it much easier to create a dashboard with a persistent view of “my team’s sales” while also having rep-specific drill-downs, for example.
Refreshed Einstein Analytics record actions
Einstein Analytics Record Actions will finally be struck by Lightning! While it won’t impact any existing functionality of the record actions, they will be more visually appealing and create a more consistent experience with the rest of Salesforce. Flow and Lightning Actions are also going to be supported, so get creative about how you want users to interact with their dashboard results, using existing flows or Lightning Actions you may have created for other areas of the user experience.
Feature Beta: Analytics Home Watchlist
While this feature is for evaluation purposes only, not for production use, the Einstein Analytics Watchlist will give users a stock-ticker-style experience by tracking and showing important metrics and changes.
From a user’s dashboards, they will be able to select a metric and choose “Add to Watchlist”:
Once chosen, metrics will appear on their Analytics Home Page in a “Watchlist” component (1) that features only the metrics that the user has selected, with trending lines (2) to show notable changes in the KPIs. Data snapshots will be captured at regular intervals to create the trending visuals.
While this is but a sampling of the myriad features coming out in January and February, these are the ones I’m most excited about. Feel free to email me at alexva@slalom.com if you’d like to talk more about how Slalom can help you use Einstein Analytics to grow your business!
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