Last week I attended Salesforce’s CPQ (previously known as Steelbrick) Roadmap Webinar. During the presentation, the speakers, Dan Milbrath, talked about what users of CPQ can hope to see down the line.
- Performance and Scalability
- Lightning CPQ enhancements
- Lightning for Billing
- Extending the platform
From these goals, some key elements were called out. In terms of performance and scalability, like much of other portions of Salesforce, more business logic is being moved over to the browser, rather than being server side. This is to be able to reduce processing and increase the speed. As part of this, they are also working on asynchronous processing and additional caching features.
Salesforce is also working to move more of the data into the core model. This makes me very happy, as to me it means that they are working towards CPQ (Steelbrick) no longer being an installed application, which can cause some hairiness at times.
They are also investing more time into API enhancements. This includes better documentation and API interfaces similar to other areas of Salesforce – yay! In addition, they are working to leverage the Lightning framework in order to give more control over for Lightning users.
The last thing that was discussed during the Webinar was the new Winter 18 release for CPQ. There are not too many changes in this release, but the highlights that Dan called out are:
- Style changes to match the rest of SF Lightning (less white space, less scrolling)
- Configuration Attribute drawer option, instead of just having them all at the top
- Configurator dynamically adds product options
The complete release notes can be found here: https://community.steelbrick.com/t5/Release-Notes/Salesforce-CPQ-Winter-18-Release-Notes/ta-p/18550
Overall, I found the 30 min Webinar to be a useful resource in gaining a better understanding of what Salesforce sees as a top priority in their roadmap for CPQ, and I highly recommend getting invited to the next one.
sf9to5 