Decoding Salesforce Summer 16 Release Notes

It has been 2 months since the latest major salesforce release, the spring 2016 edition. The new release again aimed at bridging the gaps left in Lightning Experience and bringing the Lightning UI to more functionalities and products, like Visualforce. There are again hundreds of small and big changes, in all major features and products. Even the thought he focus was more on Lightning, Salesforce continue to entice mobile audience bringing more mobile centric features.

The release note document was 428 page long. So thought it would be a great benefit for people of this platform, if I summarized it from the perspective of a Salesforce Developer and user.

Features For Lightning Experience Only

As I said, the main focus of the release was on Lightning and its related technologies. Some features, are available only to Lightning Experience.

Sending Emails through Gmail or Office 365 Accounts directly from Salesforce: You can now set up your instance to send Salesforce Emails through Gmail or Office 365 directly. You can select only one of them though, not both. Sending emails through Gmail or Office 365, improves your deliverability and gives you of course get to see these emails from your Gmail or Office 365 accounts as well.
Email Object: The emails send through Salesforce are now stored in a separate Email object instead of tasks. The UI of the object is quite close to the traditional email managing software like outlook and thunderbird.
Auto Complete In Accounts: The new UI has cool auto-complete features. Give it a spin when you create or update contacts and accounts next time.
More Connected Accounts: You can now enable your accounts to show their Company images. It's mainly for US based accounts as of now. Also, you can stay updated on what's happening in your Account’s companies through the News app.
Tasks and Activities directly from the feed: You can now manage your tasks and activities directly from activity feed.
Home Customization: You can now customize your Salesforce home page for different user profiles using Lightning App builder.
Visualforce and Lightning: Visualforce for Lightning Experience in now available for all Salesforce instances.
New Calendar Features: You can now select and add a Calendar in your custom or standard object. Calendar items that correspond to the same object are denoted by a specific color.
New Salesforce App For Microsoft Outlook: You can now integrate your desktop outlook with Salesforce more easily. The app is named Lightning for Outlook.

New Enhancements in Lightning Components: There have been some new enhancements in Lightning Components that are kind of critical to many Salesforce users.

Enforce Access Check Errors have been updated making it easier to check violations for Lightning resources. It's useful for those developers who still gets frustrated when debugging Lightning code.
The Lightning Components have a new security architecture named LockerService that further enhances the security by isolating individual Lightning components in their own containers.
We now have a New debugger for Lightning Components called Salesforce Lightning Inspector. It is Google Chrome DevTools extension that can be leveraged to debug Lightning Components. Again super useful for Salesforce Developers.
New Configurations now make it easier to create a component or an app thanks to the new Lightning Bundle panel in the Developer Console.

These were some of the major updates related to Salesforce Lightning. There are many more updates and I will try to publish more on other major SFDC changes not related to Lightning. Maybe in the next post. So stay tuned.