Salesforce Releases

We needed a Book, so here's a Boo.

• Winter '25 Abridged
• Summer '24 Abridged
• Spring '24 Abridged
• Winter '24 Abridged
• Summer '23 Abridged
• Spring '23 Abridged
• Winter '23 Abridged
• Summer '22 Abridged
• Spring '22 Abridged
• Winter '22 Abridged
• Summer '21 Abridged
• Spring '21 Abridged
• Winter '21 Abridged
• Summer '20 Abridged
• Spring '20 Abridged
• Winter '20 Abridged
• Summer '19 Abridged
• Spring '19 Abridged
• Winter '19 Abridged
• Summer '18 Abridged
• Spring '18 Abridged
• WINTER 18 RELEASE NOTES
• Summer 17 Release Cliff Notes - The Ancestor to the ARN
• Spring '25 Abridged

Winter '25 Abridged

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The Salesforce Discord Collective Presents:
THE WINTER 25 RELEASE NOTES - ABRIDGED
Powered by ArgentForce

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CRITICAL STUFF

• Breaking MDAPI Change that breaks anything targeting Roles and Subordinates
• Contact your AE to get Salesforce Foundations features activated for free. This bring Sales and Service licences a bit closer together in Core, and also give you Data Cloud, Commerce, and Marketing functions. Well-suited to initial discovery of features.

HYPED STUFF

• Data Cloud, the software formerly known as CDP continues its quest to plug in to everything and is probably the fastest-evolving cloud ATM. If you want a TL;DR Salesforce Data Cloud is priorly Salesforce Customer Data Platform, a Data Warehouse for unstructured data — the reason it’s become so big is that previously Genie was the tool to make unstructured data structured, but with the current focus on AI solutions (which they called back in their CDP Marketing), they realized they could NOT have to structure said data and just make it exploitable, which is what they’re selling. In reality the biggest advantage for Companies (IMO) now is NLP data entry and query, because that means that people can easily fill records and access data, tasks that non-IT folk find boorish. Example with Report Formulas that were always a bit arcane, but the new AI Formula Builder will help new users get used to the syntax. The example they give as a usecase is as woefully limited as the actual assistant’s success in generating complex formulas as of yet. (because HYPe)
• Einstein Copilot is now Agentforce with a gazillion of the hype and… most of the same features. The major structural change is the grouping within Topics which can contain Actions. So in short you get a Natural Language Processing module that identifies Topics in which it can leverage Actions that you describe, removing unwanted behavior via Guardrails. You can setup a quick one via this Trailhead. If you read between the lines you still need to surface the data it needs properly, and to control the actions it takes, so you can do so securely - but it is a very nice front-end for stuff. Also Salesforce is working on hosting its own backend for all this, called Atlas.
• If you didn’t understand that AI is a VERY BIG DEAL, SF is giving you free AI training and certifications

GENERAL STUFF

• Highlights Panel gets updated, finally can contain 12 fields, doesn’t rely on outdated Compact Layouts, also available -on mobile.
• We’re back in 2004 with Formulas to do icons except now you can style the entire field, for Dynamic Fields-supported Objects, which is lovely but I am sure will also be abused and battered in less than a month (after release, which is in November for some reason)
• You can now treat Person Accounts like Contacts in Reporting
• Sales Cloud gets Opportunity Splits by Territories with Associated Forecasts, and there’s new Dashboard data security settings if you use Territories as well as a new shiny custom dashboard for Account plans which is basically just a well setup Sales homepage with a few custom components.
• If you’re using Capture Leads from LinkedIn, it will break without action from your part despite it being a “Release update”
• Data Privacy Center is now Platform native instead of a Managed Package, available in specific Regions it seems to be free has been edited and isn't free and allows previewing impact data rules which allow masking, deleting, or retaining data
• DevOps Center is now available for Bitbucket Cloud which means I have to look into it seriously, but the feedback I’ve heard has been more than bad, so I am not looking forward to this.

Service

• If you were bad at building Dashboards, Einstein can create a Service one for you. Data in Release Note presumably taken directly from the Salesforce T1 stats.
• Enhanced Bots now recognize Intents even on the first message, which is nice but weird that this wasn’t the case before. They also get new components which are all async - meaning the customer can answer later. Async components didn’t exist before. Bots also get automatic translation for components (setup required). Something called strict recognition allows less CPU spent processing bad data, but what about the impact on accuracy ?
• Messaging for In App and Web gets… a full-fledged API so you can do full-custom Chat implementations, Mobile App Full Integration, Dev Edition Support and Standard Events for better debugging, UX Improvements also for Setup and maintenance, better error handling, proper Post-Chat Surveys… and my personal favourite, Bring Your Own Channel, which means you can now integrate third parties yourself into Omnichannel and Salesforce Support, or build your own from scratch if you feel like it. INSANE levels of flexibility, and when you compare with LiveAgent 5 years ago… just wow.
• Omnichannel on Mobile allows users to be spammed with work even in the train :D

ADMINISTRATION

• In Permissions world, the User Access Summary allows you to see how they have access (or don’t) to a field, and Object, or a Permission. Very Powerful, very sleek. The Object-centric side of this same view also exists - so you can view by User or by Object. The added part of firing Events for Perm changes is nice but doesn’t seem finished (plus you need Event Monitoring to enjoy it, which is still Shield if I remember). The Permission Groups Management with better inbuilt documentation via Description field seems very powerful with nested Public Groups - this might be a very good way to handle specific permission structures, seeing as UAPs can be based on Groups.
• You can now mass edit Users in List View
• Custom Report Types get brought to Lightning with a new fancy-pants editor and list views

FLOWS

• The new Action Button is greatly helpful in streamlining how people engage with multi-step processes (and makes designing Subflows even more useful).
• You can now replace your Loop/Assign combos with Transform which now applies to standard data types, meaning you can use it to transform one list of Objects to another, or extract a list from a collection, or summarize values directly in-memory.
• Quick Reminder that you have one year to Add necessary Run Flows permissions to Users otherwise they can’t run em anymore. Also, if you use the NavigateEverywhere UnofficialSF thing, this release update probably impacts you.
• The Create element now supports Upsert via IDs, External IDs, or… standard fields ??? They also need to update the “make sure that ID is blank” bit. Powerful, only turned on via a switch, easily revertable - good update.
• The famously-repeated Repeater Component can now be used to Update Collections, an upgrade from its previous state of only allowing creations.
• Disabling Fields on Screens is now possible through a Property of the Field which means that you can set it in the Flow, or from a Field/Permission value, which means that if a Field is disabled and it shouldn’t, you now need to check FLS, OLS, Lex Page settings, and then the Flow, if you have a Flow in a Dynamic LEX Page on an Object. Powerful, but spaghett.
• On the Display side, the new Error Pane is lik the old errors and warnings, but better displayed, and LWCs now display API Name and Label to recognize them better, and Data Table Single Row Selection now uses Checkboxes which has minor functional impact.
• Flow has resurrected Clippy with helpful tips to avoid doing bad design
• You can now search for Children Resources directly in the resource picker which is one of my favourites this release. Variable management is now also easier both in creation and update

DEVELOPMENT

• RESURECTION ! Ye Olde LWC Local Dev is back in a new and improved form: Real Time Preview
• BREAKING: The LWC API v62 brings breaking changes on styles and eslint rules. DOM structure
  also has breaking changes, as do Dynamic SOQL Error Messages, the way you can request Sandbox Refreshes via the Tooling API also has a breaking change regarding the newly required ActivationUserGroupId field which points to a Group, and the CORS whitelist applying to api.salesforce.com can also be breaking if you abused this in the past.
• Instanced URL (like https://eu1.salesforce.com) stop working on Oct. 21th, update your references if you didn’t do so the gazillion times this was announced. Help is available directly in setup
• Apex Exceptions now fire events which are part of a Free Tier of Event Monitoring so you can track those properly instead of relying on emails. They also fire on more stuff including AuraEnabled, RestResource and InvocableAction
• You can now serve 1MB JS files in your LWC components. I look forward to the first org I open which loads a 1GB page (unless they full do Server Side Rendering everywhere which could then be pretty awesome for complex logique handling)
• LWS automatic is "indefinitely postponed" due to existing high-customization customers. You can still activate it manually, and for once I would not bet that it means it will be left by the wayside.
• You can temporarily turn Distortions on and off via the Debug mode. Forgot wtf those are ? TL;DR “Creates Synthetic Namespaces so that malicious code can’t access data from other components”. Turning them off makes reading the outputs of the components easier.
• You can now do LWCs with typescript instead of vanilla JS. There’s a few considerations but it’ll make coding LWCs easier for most devs.
• LWR gets polymorphic Pages with a Builder to add a Data Provider, a path to upgrade LWR to Enhanced LWR and more design options in the Builder as well as the file upload component (that one’s pretty huge for adoption) and whitelisting Clickjack protection.
• A new tool allows you to migrate from a Connected App to an External App for your local devs, which allows you to see oAuth Usage. External Apps can also be created via the App Manager like Connected Apps could be, and can now be used to package oAuth Custom Scopes, as well as setting the start URL. Combined with the possibility of Making them visible in the App Launcher this means that you can now make custom third-party redirects from Salesforce that authentify you. Nice. Note that to get Consumer Credentials you need to Change to Connect REST from MDAPI
• SSO Gets a huge upgrade with dynamic Authentication Parameters which get passed to the Provider. TL;DR ‘no more static definition of parameters that the external provider expects’. New Token Exchange UI so you don’t have to do MDAPI stuff to get tokens either. Awesome. Quick reminder that you also need to Migrate to Multiple Configuration SAML Framework, new tool to verify the integrations can help you debug.
• If you already use headless Identity for your custom apps, note that changes in those endpoints try to follow the currently-emerging global (not just salesforce) standard for headless identity. Or said differently "powerful but prone to changes". (aka unstable)
• A new /Services/oauth2/revoke endpoint allows you to deactivate individual JWT tokens instead of revoking all the ones in your Org
• List Views change backend tech which has minor UI impact but some nice advantages even for developers (even if I find weird to create List Views via Wire, I’d have expected Tooling built eh)

OTHER CLOUDS

• Commerce gets a Product Visibility Troubleshooter in the Commerce App, Automated Order Confirmation Emails, and improve user navigation through a mini cart and endless product scrolling. They also open cheaper licenses as well as proper high res image handling. They also decided to [reinvent the wheel] by having yet another builder to manage branding and reinvent related lists idk as well as a custom Path implementation much wow.
• If you’re still paying for CPQ, ex-Steelbrick, really - look into changing to Revenue Cloud instead. It’s still only two-thirds baked though.
• FSC Migrates from Managed Package to Core, but the reference link died this week for some reason. Plz Halp.
• Marketing Cloud sees a new Marketing Cloud Advanced release which comes complement Growth which itself gets A/B Testing and Live Insights. If I had to guess, I’d say that Data Cloud-based systems will eventually be the on-platform rewrite of the Old Exact Target. Or TL;DR “keep eyes on this if you’re using Marketing”.

DOGELAND

• :doge: We “Increased” the inbound email limit Except it was a soft limit previously where emails would actually still get processed, and now exceeding it results in soft bounces.
• :doge: Email Addresses must now comply with RFC standards and as such require quotation of the local-part in edge-cases where otherwise invalid characters exist. The “Latest RFC standards” is RFC5322 section 3.2.4. from 2008 lmao why is actually just reinforcing that double dots were invalid as early as 2004 in RFC3696 but it’s ok they’re also enforcing RC7208 from 2015 so at least there’s minor improvement in delays, 10 years or less :kek:
• :doge: Export from Data Cloud-connected CRM Analytics Assets (Beta)… Data Cloud > Supposedly stores millions of rows of unstructured data and helps you map it to existing structures > Makes exports available > 32 MB CSV > Assuming an export of 20 fields of which a single one is 255 chars and the others are roughly 50 chars, you get roughly 1,226 characters per row, so… 28 000 rows as an export. Much data. Such wow. Very report.
• :doge: Purchase Own, release standalone Archive… Probably kill it in under a year I guess.? Goodbye Backup Semi-Features
• :doge: They added a feature to multipicklists. As long as that feature isn’t “Removed Multipicklists for pressing ceremonial reasons” I’m not interested.
• :doge: I’d love to see how this looks by 2030
• :doge: Yo we know this is bad practice and we wanna fix it but too many of y’all decided to jump the gun and do stupid stuff so we’ll just leave it up to you to activate this at some point IDK, same here but with a continuously-delayed update but at least it’s not 6 years old like this one
• :doge: mwhid —> X
• :doge: SLA targets per Queue Assignment in Omnichannel ! **(paid offering, requires Service Intelligence because it has to do with Einstein… oh. wait. it doesn’t ? well, more money for Marc.)
• :doge: A new Mobile App is basically just a preconfigured SF App for Sales People, which, great, but the standard app does that well enough? And the Administrator also gets a new sales setup menu which gets its own Product name for some reason ? and Service gets a “Journey” of the same thing but different
• :doge: Use an LLM to rewrite your grantee applications for board approval, because we know that AI totally understands the equilty issues the grant application is probably about!

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This abridged version was graciously written up by the SF Discord

We have a nice wiki: https://wiki.sfxd.org/

And a linkedin page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sfxd/

Join the ~14000 members in the most active chat-based community around Salesforce these parts of the web at http://join.sfxd.org/

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Summer '24 Abridged

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The Salesforce Discord Collective Presents:
THE SUMMER 24 RELEASE NOTES - ABRIDGED
GEN AI will be a success the day I don’t have to keep writing these

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CRITICAL STUFF

• This Release Update which totally won’t get cancelled forgotten or delayed 5 years forces verification of your default no-reply address. Action required for all that use outbound emails with that address.

GENERAL STUFF

• You can finally use blank spaces in Dynamic Forms and add fields on creation to them as well as see in which Dynamic Form they’re used. With recent updates they are now usable-ish (one year after release…) - if you’re migrating, check out this wiki on considerations. Using this feature involves a free coffee break while you wait for Lightning Page Builder to load!
• Tab Component on LEX Pages gets Conditional Visibility per Tab
• To compensate the mounting sharing complexity, you can now view a Summary of Permissions and Access on Users. In the same vein, you get Permset- and Permset Group- Permission Summaries, and you can also see where a Group is used. A new help page groups all the User Access docs together.
• User Access Policies are now GA with a limit of 200 active UAP per Org, and you can control their order of execution which you couldn’t before.
• Freezing Users does not require you to be able to create them and edit them anymore which is great for deputy admins
• Search Manager allows you to change security, sorting, etc for search for your users. Once search is fully refined you can expect Salesforce to find product names that stick more than a year.
• List Views are now running as LWC not Aura which yields some considerations regarding how List Views behave. I also put this one in Doge because of their wording and title.
• Einstein Activity Capture gets automated Contact Creation
• Salesforce seems to want to bring Topics for Objects back via Labels so people can sort stuff themselves. Not a fan of this but eh.
• Those new “intelligence” views from last release now support standard and custom actions
• External Apps, the “Connected App v2”, now have a frontend to create them and support more oAuth flows. (Also have a new API endpoint to manage credentials). Within these External Apps, Named Credentials can now call a Refresh token on custom status codes instead of just 401.
• The switch of focus from CPQ to Revenue Cloud seems to be an open secret at this point seeing as Steelbrick has been left to die for years now while RLM gets better product catalog, pricing and configuration management.

SERVICE

The MIAW team gets the award of “team that I have liked reading the releases of the most over the past year consistently”. Have a cookie.

• Enhanced Messaging, Messaging for In-App and Web, and Voice Transcripts get sensitive data rules which allow masking or deleting data matching conditions in these elements.
• Status-Based Capacity with Messaging is a HUGE feature with a shit name. You’de think it’s the same old “based on the agent’s status” crap we’ve had for years, but no, it’s per work item status. The example they give is exactly why it’s awesome: “If a session is inactive and the customer sends a new message, the agent who was handling it receives the message and continues helping the customer”.
• Messaging for in-app and Web now allows you to do your full-custom UI in your website or app on top of their API. There’s also quite a few releases about messaging components which use a builder to build custom forms, data exposition or input in Messaging. I hadn’t noticed that in past releases but it looks sweet. On the Agent side there’s filtered Transfer options and refresh after disconnect
• Unified Knowledge allows you to import articles from other systems like JIRA or Sharepoint, unsure why it’s not just listed as a data import tool or something.

FLOWS

• Action Button allows you to call an Autolaunched Flow from a Screen and use returns from that Flow.
• Address fields can now be required and be autofilled via search, and also store ISO Codes for State and Country which is all great but feels like it should have always been the case.
• Reactivity got brought to Collection Choices
• ISBLANK and ISEMPTY operators lessen the amount of workarounds needed to check the state of a string or collection.
• Creating Records now allows you to check for duplicates using a Flow-specific engine that is not the Duplicate Rules and allows merging… If it’s bad practice when I rebuild standard in a client Org, why can Salesforce rebuild its own standard in its own application ?
• The Automation Lightning App looks like a non-setup way to allow users to see, group and maybe edit Flows. Can be nice for delegated Admins I guess.
• Record (Un)Locks now can be controlled via Flow which is VERY powerful because no previous automation tool could do it :)
• Unlimited Flow Interviews are probably only useful for huge clients as most the time you should optimize to avoid undue waits anyway. Yes, you should optimize to avoid undue load. Jankforce isn’t best practice even if it works.
• You can FINALLY stop building your own case threading formula and just tell Flow to add the threading token for you. The best part is the threading token isn’t just for Cases anymore but for any Activity-Enabled Object. Understated feature of this release IMO.
• You need to review your Flow permissions so it’ll continue working after Winter 25. Security is becoming something Flow cares very much about, even for URLs

DATA CONSOLIDATION AND VISUALISATION

• Data Cloud continues to try to be a useful platform. While some updates are just “why wasn’t it that way before anyway”, others are pretty impressive and seem to be thought out for Service most of all. Tons of the major notes are mostly around "we’re building what most other data lakes already have". I still don’t think I’d buy it outright on most clients, it’ll be nice in a year as per usual with Salesforce I guess. If you read this page and you’re wondering about classification vs regression read this. There’s something called unified messaging that looks to be interesting for Marketing Cloud users that leverage Whatsapp (it’s critical if you are), and Marketing Cloud Growth looks like it’ll already soon be a good replacement for Pardot or whatever name it is now.
• Something called Intelligent Analytics seems to be preconfigured Data Cloud and Normal Reports for Service, Field Service, and Commerce (?) but licenses seem to vary for each product.

DEVELOPMENT

With most of the articles being factual, exhaustive, example-full and linking to proper documentation both in reference and in help pages, the Development subsection gets a special award for being lovely release notes that were actually interesting.

• LWC API v61 brings FACE compatibility for programmatic form control, and force only connected components to use connectedCallback() and disconnectedCallback(), which also dispatch errors globally now.
• You can now Update using an External Id in REST using update
• Dynamic Formulas in APEX were first available last release (but as a pilot only so we didn’t cover them). Yes, that does mean you can evaluate formulas without DML, and technically can invent create them on-th-fly without an actual field, and yes it’s awesome.
• Apex now was Cursors which are an alternative to Batches wherein you control which subset of that data you are referencing. There are new limits tied to this
• You could already use Third-Party Web Components in LWC but now you can do that while exposing shadowRoot which makes 90% of use cases NOT bug out instantly. This feature allows you to provide custom-branded styling Web Components by uploading them as a staticresource. Anything you can write client-side, you can put in there.
• Support for Five-Level Parent-to-Child Relationship SOQL Queries in Apex
• Scheduled APEX Jobs, including CRON, can now be viewed and managed using the new All Scheduled Jobs page
• LWCs can now be url-adressable and can control the utility bar which I’m guessing can be interesting for CTI cases for example ?
• OpenAPI Spec ingestion to External Services now support YAML
• The Pub/Sub API now has subscription objects
• A release update which also totally won’t get cancelled forgotten or delayed 5 years allows modal Stacking. Action required both in LWC and Aura quick actions.
• Google Chrome Storage Partitionning is enabled this release and can be disabled. Multiple APIs change behavior, specifically localStorage and sessionStorage. The first-party cookies requirements adds to this.
• SLDS styling focus buttons change
• If you use @testSetup to generate your test data you can now monitor their execution.
• Logging gets better for consultants thanks to Apex exception emails including the org name, user name, and My Domain name
• Scratch Org Snapshots are now beta and allow you to clone scratch orgs. At some point you’ll be able to mount VHDSK in them as well I’m sure (/s).
• Mobile Publisher gets opt-in biometrioc login, a new distribution method, new menus for LWR sites, and requires new Firebase information
• “If you did stuff we told you not to do, you might want to do stuff we told you to do instead, because otherwise shit’ll break”

DOGELAND

• :doge: Related Lists are now “Enrichments” and are now supported on “more Objects” - which is apparently all the explanation we’re being given at this time… Thanks Data Cloud Release Notes, thank heck you decided to give us monthly release notes so I can stay on top of your vocabulary in addition of your feature list.
• :doge: “General Setup > Einstein for Formulas” (but Note: Contact your Account Executive (AE) to understand the pricing and license requirements for this feature.), AKA “let’s pretend you get AI stuff but hide pricing behind blog posts”. In testing, the AI also worked fine for simple formulas and failed for more complex ones with nested conditions or mathematical considerations, which is where you’d need it.
• :doge: "Improved Performance" yeah no. You migrated to a new framework in the backend, and there are considerations for admins to check if things impact their org. ALL the bullet points in your release note are limits are changes in behavior.
• :doge: You can use Direct SOQL to query Data Cloud Objects (if you love getting only a few records using a specific query class, while ignoring field access rules)
• :doge: 10% of net spend but let’s not make that public using the usual “available using extra licensing” or whatever. Same shit for "Custom Adapters for Salesforce Connect" Like brudda that feature is EXPENSIVE AS FUCK it’s 5k/month lol
• :doge: If there’s one thing Admins love it’s “security” features that get auto-enabled and high process cost but low security benefit
• :doge: If your naming’s so shit you need to list them every time because it’s too confusing maybe you can like… stop renaming stuff badly.
• :doge: “Label-First” is great when you action something, not when you’re digging in a manager to find where something happened. This is how you end up with Hungarian notation again. Especially if you auto-generate names (rolled back) forgetting your own darn best practices but it’s ok because you get to click more when searching for screen elements anyway anymore
• :doge: Einstein Flow Creator 90000 is now available in Beta (for $70/m/user) and the demo they chose is a Big Deal Alert because it can’t do anything complex I guess.
• :doge: Maybe it’s just me but if SMS was insecure and required update to TOTP etc, maybe don’t release a feature for SMS OTP for a subset of users IDK

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This abridged version was graciously written up by the SF Discord

We have a nice wiki: https://wiki.sfxd.org/

And a linkedin page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sfxd/

Join the ~14000 members in the most active chat-based community around Salesforce these parts of the web at http://join.sfxd.org/

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Spring '24 Abridged

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The Salesforce Discord Collective Presents:
THE SPRING 24 RELEASE NOTES - ABRIDGED
You’ll notice there’s not that many AI stuff actually released. Half-baked Hype ? In MY Salesforce?! :pika:

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CRITICAL STUFF

• Locale Codes Change (mostly for Spanish speaking countries) as SF migrates from JDK to ICU Locale Codes. If you’re an international org, study impact now as rolling activation will end in 2025.
• Probably the most minor change I’ve ever put in Critical : The Publish and Preview Buttons in Experience Builder are now Swapped. For “logical order and consistency”. Habitual users beware.
• Implemented SAML a LONG time ago ? Check if you’re affected by this SAML Framework migration which can break your SSO otherwise.

GENERAL STUFF

• Dynamic Forms get Cross Object Fields, say goodbye to formulas pulling information from the Parent. Also tell you Field API Names thank heck.
• Dynamic Actions are now set in the Lightning App Builder instead of Page Layout, also are compatible with Mobile now.
• You can Translate Related List Labels in Dynamic related lists now
• MFA switches from Forced Enablement to Annoyance-As-A-Service for non-compliant users (still enabled by default for new orgs).
• If you don’t have Activity Capture and are using GMAIL, Salesforce made logging mails simpler and honestly pretty cool.
• Salesforce now warns you when you try to create the sorry excuse for a field that is multi-select picklists. If you’re wondering what to do instead, the answer has mostly always been “use a related junction object instead”.
• Salesforce remembered that having Profiles that have CRUD to stuff by default is bad and is now pushing a new profile for Minimum Access - API Only Integrations instead of the new-but-already-old Salesforce API Only Systems Integration
• The Mobile App is getting ever more offline ready. I don’t know when Salesforce will finish this, but existing offline app sellers beware.
• The BULK API now retries with smaller chunks before failing, which is pretty awesome
• Sales get a new homepage like the contact, lead and opp ones. This seems to be Salesforce’s push to be slightly more “out-of-the-box” with industry-standard reports. In the same vein "Lead Intelligence View" "Contact Intelligence" and "Account Intelligence" are basically a prettier report on Activities but is nice.
• Experiences now have a list of past Site Publications to make finding who put the cat gif in the homepage easier.
• Forecasts can now be grouped and viewed in tabs, include external data and opp splits, and you can see adjustments in columns next to the original data instead of just a window on hover.
• AI-powered Search for Case Answers is now GA. Feature looks good, and the team gets "best screenshot award" for making me smile.
• Gen AI now works in some EU and AMER languages instead of just English. Which is nice, but as always well see bias that is stronger.
• Field service has a Document Builder now. Looks like a possible replacement for conga et. al, except for now it’s half-baked and for Field Service only.
• Custom Object Slugs for Objects allow you to resolve http://my.site.com/mytripname/tips instead of http://my.site.com/a01561000000Mjya/list-view
• Commerce has Tons of pages of release notes, which resolve to "We did more components to avoid you coding everything. Also, they mostly all require code to use or turn on. Oh and people don’t lose their cart when they login anymore".

SERVICE

• Omni Supervisor New Page Builder and custom Tabs
• Email to Case gets improvements. I had flashbacks when I read this title, but now it turns out these are actually improvements.
• Bots get Async Components which can do a variety of stuff from Authentication to calling external systems. They can also send dynamically generated files (a feature they loved so much they published it twice) though the “Flows can populate ContentVersions with information” is news to me (apex: see here). Disambiguation allows you to catch intents in the wild and use them in your model if you see fit, and automated translations for Dialogs helps you go faster.
• Status-Based Capacity and Sensitive Data Obfuscation now available in MIAW.
• In Chat, you can use an API to populate the Pre-chart form instead of doing shitty JS hacks. Also All your agents are John now
• The Note isn’t very clear but it looks like you can use Salesforce to leverage other Chat platforms? like Heychat or something ? Big if true. But like … “It’s simple ! Install Appexchanges that don’t exist yet or code it all yourself !!!” is almost doge-worthy.
• The Conversation LWC gets more configurable
• The SMS Channel looks nice enough but there’s neither location nor pricing information to be found. Seriously tell me how and when and for how much I can buy your stuff

FLOWS

• The new repeater component allows users flexibly to add one or multiple instances of data on a single screen, and returns a collection.
• The new repeater component allows users flexibly to add one or multiple instances of data on a single screen, and returns a collection.
• The new repeater component allows users flexibly to add one or multiple instances of data on a single screen, and returns a collection.
• DataTable no longer clears selections after each search.
• HTTPCallouts now get an autoconfiguration via external call if you so want.
• Display Text and Long Text join the reactivity party
• Event-Triggered Flows can now run as the Default Workflow User meaning you can now have async admin-privileged actions done.
• Flow’s own version of validation Rules gets applied more places but not in Choices.
• Flows now allow you to save with errors which is like nice for when you don’t finish configuring, but is meh Admin practice I feel.
• External Services can now handle callbacks up to a year =o. This allows you to get information back from an endpoint you call from Flow via External Services. It also allows Devs to use APEX to call these External Services for the same function.
• Activity Capture (and Conversation Insights, but that’s paid) now fire off Platform Events that you can use to trigger flows based on Activity or Insight data
• Flows using Email Alerts get listed under the email alert so you can more easily find why you received that sample template.
• Release Updates change Sharing and Permissions for users using Flow, so ensure you are still compatible with the release before it starts being an issue. They also validate External Redirections more.

ANALYTICS

• Dashboard userfriendliness goes up, with 5 filters up from 3, the (not-too-soon) end of having to delete filters to edit them, the (also not-to-soon) ability to rearrange multiple columns at once and the ability to TRANSFER OWNERSHIP and put Headers and Details in your Dashboards - now for EVERYONE. That last one was Ultimate and Performance only before.
• The new Analytics homepage gets Bulk Item Edition and folder sharing management
• CRM Analytics has a few very nice feature releases on all fronts this release. It’d be even better if people still knew what this Tableau-but-not-also-maybe-reports (old Wave) was.
• Data Cloud releases sum down to "we are integrating Data Cloud and Core more" which is nice and poses the question - “what will the future of databases in Salesforce look like ?”
• Data Cloud has lots of AI updates, which shouldn’t be much of a surprise, which sum down to "We gave you an interface so you can exploit the Models you either generate or bring to the platform", and also we integrate with more platforms for data and model ingestion". What I’m wondering is if Data Cloud will stay one product - it seems weird that it is handling stuff related to AI instead of Einstein, while the core of Data Cloud -(the Data Model objects and Data Lake objects) are specific enough to warrant their own blog posts (but not release note, looks like…). BTW, you can use predictions in Flow and use Flows to send data to Data Cloud but the action name proooobably shouldn't stay as-is.

DEVELOPMENT

• ANT Tool is deprecated. Not critical because SF CLI covers the functions now, but a moment of silence for our fallen comrade, joining MavensMate in the great hall of Salesforce Tools that Were Awesome When They Came Out And Stayed Useful For A Long While
• NULL COALESCING IN APEX. A clamor of joy for all devs.. Have some confetti
• UUID v4 Generation
• You can now retrieve local or packaged CustomTranslations.
• SF Sneakily fixing insecure behavior in Type.forName hiding behind “indeterminate results” to say “woops we had a hole there” lol
• You should also read the External Services Callback note
• If you have an API-only user that accesses tons of data, you can deactivate the Most Recently Used list
• LWC api v60.0 bumps LWC OSS version to 5.0, has breaking changes, careful
• New-(ish) record-picker component, uses GraphQL Wire Adapter, can be used Offline
• Accessibility
• New Distortions for APIs. Forgot wtf those are ? TL;DR “Creates Synthetic Namespaces so that malicious code can’t access data from other components”
• Custom Component Instrumentation API allows you to view custom component logs on the browser console
• Callouts after restoring to Savepoints finally work
• Scratch Orgs Snapshots so you can use persistent states of scratch orgs instead of setting them up from scratch programmatically to ensure that deployments and setup work as designed… ?
• Managed Event Subscriptions allow you to handle disconnects and reconnects by sending the last repay Id you have, and receive further events. Also Event Relays can now process events in EU now
• In LWR sites, you can now declaratively setup search filters and objects, and spacing/layout controls. You can also Dynamically redirect users to External Websites now whereas you could only dynamic redirects for internal links before.
• Mobile LWCs now support Biometric Auth via Mobile Publisher
• The Token Exchange Flow is a new OAuth Flow that allows you to handle situations where an IDP needs to handle multiple SPs.
• Salesforce implements Refresh Token rotation which will probably become mandatory in a bit. Other OAuth2 flow changes seem to indicate that best practice will be to use External Apps for everything ranging from CI/CD to actual consumer apps.

DOGELAND

• :doge: Salesforce Data Pipelines got shoved to “Salesforce Overall” from Analytics but still has no product page or any information on either cost or buying avenue on the entire internet. Dear Salesforce Website People - Maybe Check In With Your Product Teams.
• :doge: Some Third Party Product Stopped Working, Here’s Free Advertising For a Competitor
• There’s a new monthly release notes page because the Salesforce teams are so disorganized that pushing three releases comprising over 300 pages of releases per year wasn’t enough opportunity
• :doge: When you shove a something that functionally resembles something else inside of the same namespace so you end up with a function name that is irrelevant to what the thing actually does. SerializationAccess when ?
• :doge: EXPERIENCE NO CHANGES ! LIVE THE FLATNESS THAT IS YOUR EXCITEMENT CURVE
• :doge: We forced you to use our proprietary tech but running it is expensive so YOLO for Experience users it’s not like security needs to be good everywhere and everyone has good practices for external users so them not having 2Fa is completely fine we’re sure. (Plus it’s not like said tech just is another global one under the hood anyway). All that to just send you an email with a code in the end anyway ayyyyyyyyyyylmao

---

This abridged version was graciously written up by the SF Discord

We have a nice wiki: https://wiki.sfxd.org/

And a Linkedin page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sfxd/

Join the ~14000 members in the most active chat-based community around Salesforce these parts of the web at http://join.sfxd.org/

---

Winter '24 Abridged

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The Salesforce Discord Collective Presents:
THE WINTER 24 RELEASE NOTES - ABRIDGED
I’m sorry, as a Large Language Model, I do not have access to the latest Salesforce Release Notes.

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CRITICAL STUFF

• I hate that I have to put this in “Critical” but hypeland is real so: there’s a few early AI products hitting the ground. Biggest winner is service. If you don’t read it, their AI research blog is pretty darn cool. For the major part of Generative AI products, I’m betting on some public releases in 6 months or so at least, due to the fact we all handle CRM data, which is minorly regulated.
• Critical because big change but not severe Contact and Lead home now don’t just display list views, but give you "intelligence" about contacts, which is great if you like the new display (and use Activities…). Service Intelligence is the same concept for cases.
• Einstein Activity Capture can finally get reported on in standard reports and some Email features are now free
• DataWeave in APEX is now live and viewable in the UI. This fundamentally changes best practices for data transformation in APEX.
• APEX Lists now support comparators, also have a new iterator definition, both of which also changes best practice regarding how you compare stuff in APEX. you won’t have to code your own now.
• All customers get Free Maps Lite
• bla MFA enforcement bla, this video is for you if you’re not ready yet.

GENERAL STUFF

• In their quest to have as many A records as possible, Salesforce is moving Setup to another domain (and adding more partitionned domains, add it to your allowlists)
• Salesforce changes icons again after fucking up High Contrast mode for all users last release
• Taking a leaf from its own playbook 6 years ago, Salesforce now displays all Objects and fields on a single page for Permission Sets
• QoL updates for Permissions: PermSetGroups now have a recalculate button to help you diagnose mismatched permissions and errors linked to uncompatible perms. You can also report on assignments for both permsets and groups, as well as see in how many PermSetGroups a Permset is used.
• API Name are now visible on PermSets. Maybe one day they’ll even let us search for fields or objects by API Name in the setup, who knows ?
• Dynamic Forms are available on Mobile and most standard Objects (excl Campaigns, Products, and Tasks).
• You can report on AccountShares. You might ask “why accounts”, the reason is “they can’t report on Custom Object Shares and each Object requires work to bring to these reports”. TL;DR enjoy AccountShare reports, don’t expect more __share reports to come out the woodwork though.
• Mass Quick Actions on Related Lists are still here (were beta last release, and still only support Create/Edit record for now, will support stuff like Flows later)
• You can now chose who can access a sandbox for when you have proper project governance ~and want to avoid people logging in to change whatever they want because they think it’s a good a idea to delete a field or something because they don’t like it who knows~
• Email Deliverability gets more details, filters for logs and inbound + outbound logging
• Dashboards can now have their ownership transfered which means you don’t need to clone or rebuild dashboards when you realize that user that created them has left the company 5 years ago.
• Quick Actions in Experience Sites
• Service gets Cross-lingual Intent Models but I’m not sure how much I’d invest in Intent building in the current race to LLM-powered chat, though Conversation Mining does solve some of that.
• Omnichannel gets enhanced if you turn it on, gets better ui (**opinions may differ) and better backend, requires you to not use "standard" Channels
  
• A Release Update prevents redirection between salesforce orgs unless CORS is set

MESSAGING FOR IN APP AND WEB (LiveAgentv4.0)

• Present T&Cs even before Chat has started, also throw LWCs in there, hell start a Chat via API in your JS
• You can collect Secure Information via securized forms in MIAW
• Send Conversation allows you to send Notifications in MIAW (the replacement for LiveAgent), also allows sending messages from records
• Transferring Messages now better, also supports flows

FLOWS

• Flows now have a Transform element, allowing you to cast data to various types, use formulas to transform them, etc. The skill floor is getting higher and higher for Flows, to the point where learning APEX might just be simpler :kekw:
• Reactivity is now out of beta, supports Global Variables, Selections, more Formulas, Display Text in Beta. Make great screens today :D
• You can use wait elements in schedule-triggered flows, autolaunched flows, and orchestrations.
• Flow Screens retain values and also refresh when you revisit or have an error etc. GREAT QoL change.
• Record Triggered Flows now support Custom Error Messages :D to avoid defaulting to the big GACKS.
• Data Cloud Events can now trigger Flows, and Flows can get data from Data Cloud.
• HTTP Callouts now GA.
• Amongst the rare Release Updates that still happen, the user context staying the same after a Flow Resume one is pretty impactful and will be activated this release, if you abused privilege escalation behavior.
• A bug introduced in Winter24 requires you to Remove isAccessToInvokedApexRequired, isFlowApexContextRetired from Flow.Settings metadata if you don’t want deployments using sf or sfdx to fail.

DEVELOPMENT

• DevOrgs no longer support sms authentication, using U2F seems to be the easiest way for devs to go forward if you have tons of orgs.
• External Client App are basically connected apps but packageable and deployable, seem to now be available
• LWC now support Dynamic Imports, which TL;DR lets data drive which component to use. Note the performance overhead indicated in the notes, because…
• The LWC Workspace API allows you to programmatically open, close, refresh, and otherwise modify tabs in a Console environement.
• LWS virtualizes CustomElementRegistry, which ties to your ability to use Third Party Web Components (with heavy limitations, etween ECMAScript exclusions and Experience builder exclusions), but does in fact highlight a future of heavy customizations
• Custom Property Editors now available for non-LWR sites
• Component-Level API Versioning now allows you to have more tech debt instead of properly using release cycles or Release Updates. Bad Admins rejoice.
• Event Monitoring now follows Insufficient Access cases, but only for account, case, contact, and opportunity. Salesforce does love Object-specific development. EM also gets Component Level Monitoring which is nice due to the other releases
• The usual Web Standards changes lead to DOM Structures changing
• CSS scope tokens change formats, querying them now preferable via template refs.
• LWC Offline gets NFC Readability, and Biometrics Integration. As long as we’re about Offline, you can now attach images to records and search for records offline on Mobile.
• You can now set Queuable Max Depth and delay via the new System.enqueueJob()overload, and also set a Queuable Duplicate Signature allowing you to better avoid eating up all your DailyAsyncExecutions limit
• APEX logging is slightly better but you still should use nebula logger
• Events get relays on Hyperforce
• Salesforce Ids don’t change Length but do have minor structure change with serverId going from 2 to 3 characters, taking one of the “previously reserved” characters
• UTAM (Or UI Test Automation Model if you don’t remember every single SF Acronym) gets a few QoL Updates, I’m just re-highlighting that the entire concept exists.
• LWR Sites get defaulted to enhanced because CMS Content is available in Enhanced, get component variations and better visibility rules, admin-suitable css update powers (and better global CSS handling), an action bar, dynamic redirects, better static resource protection. The most interesting one is Record Detail Component coming in - this is the first time I’m sensing a proximity to “hey we might replace all Aura sites soon with LWR”. If you don’t know what all this means “Salesforce has, in roughly a year, built out a brand new Framework that should allow much better Experience management and third-party compatibility thanks to the Web Components standard, and you should see first impact in roughly another 6 months IMO.”
• If you can’t use LWR, you can now still use refreshView via LockerService
• Headless Authentication gets udpates that make it easier to leverage it or set it up
• Domain addition in SF now does more checks with better error messages (but also make adding a domain harder if you don’t know wtf you’re doing)
• DevOps Center now integrates with SF cli
• You write shit html code, it won’t work no more. sadge.
• You write shit http headers, also sadge no more worky.

SALESFORCE D2F COMMERCE

• New Wizards try to simplify your Commerce Setup, which honsetly is useless as 90% of your actual commerce exp will be custom code but whatever.
• This totally secure page allows guest users to use easily-obtainable data to get order detail information, helping pirates everywhere.
• Some SEO Optimizations make it easier to get your storefront and center.
• Automatic Lowest 30 Day Price Display for EU compliance is a nice little addition.
• Salesforce Payments continues to be worked on. I still don’t know why you’d ever use what seems to be meh code which at least partially reimplements Stripe, but walled gardens I guess.

DOGELAND

• :doge: Full APEX Autocomplete is getting retired due to its resource intensity. Which begs the question “all that AI stuff they conveniently don’t communicate Resource costs on, are they actually profitable or more VC-backed tech bubbles that are shiny but ultimately as sustainable as Bitcoin?”
• :doge: Salesforce Functions are getting retired less than two full years after release. This isn't critical because I'm guessing no one uses them. Migration path is to Heroku. Customers have already been warned.
• :doge: Visualize Summary Formulas in Reports as you create them sounds great up until you realize they just mean they did a conditional display of a static image in the report builder, and it doesn’t really preview what you’re building to allow sanity checking. At least they didn’t just take the Classic image…
• You know what’d be awesome ? If we constantly saved Flows without telling you and then make it harder to revert to a known previous step by clicking Undo tons of times like on Cookie Clicker
• :doge: Let’s publish a slack feature and retire it less than a year later lol
• :doge: Email Threading now has lightning threading which is literally just refIds but with exclamaiton marks to indicate how awe-inspiring this whole email thread process was.

---

This abridged version was graciously written up by the SF Discord

We have a nice wiki: https://wiki.sfxd.org/

And a linkedin page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sfxd/

Join the ~14000 members in the most active chat-based community around Salesforce these parts of the web at http://join.sfxd.org/

---

Summer '23 Abridged

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The Salesforce Discord Collective Presents:
THE SUMMER 23 RELEASE NOTES - ABRIDGED
This marks the 20th release of the ARN.
What I’m saying is that next release should be good, because the ARN themselves will be able to drink independently.

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CRITICAL STUFF

• Mass Quick Actions on Related Lists are finally here (but only support Create/Edit record for now, will support stuff like Flows later), allowing you to finally mass edit all your accounts to “TEST Do Not Delete” in one single mistake.
• SOQL Child Transversal updated to a depth of 5 (via API only, ain’t no APEX), sadge wich will be awesome for Permission Queries for example

GENERAL STUFF

• You can now use either Third-party or Saleforce MFA when logging in via SSO, so your confused users can be even more confused as to what they’re logging in to (yes I know it’s for security).
• Einstein Search gets a few updates, the main one being the possibility to change Searchable Objects per Profile, which is pretty cool for personalization.
• Permissions continue to evolve towards PermSets, get OrgWide Email perms added and prepare the more complex but powerful perms future with better reporting, while PermSetGroups start invading Named Credentials (and assigning Credential Access directly has moved from the Credential to the Permission Set or Profile, which isn’t documented properly but whatevs.)
• Messaging for In-App and Web continues its release frenzy with better pre-chat forms that also don’t show if the user already answered it in a session and cross-subdomain/cross-device chat, voice-message support, and better button display. Still not completely at LiveAgent parity, but already has some things that make it better in a few context. Study potential migration paths already IMO.
• Einstein Bots get an API which I’m guessing is usable to integrate Bots with some LLM goodness, also get tons of minor updates yay ?.
• If you were abusing Inactive Picklist Values, you can’t anymore, the 4000 cap is now firm and enforced
• Meetings can now be offered by email and from the Composer but I have not found if the Salesforce Meetings SKU is paid or just a marketing name…
• For GDPR compliance you can host a contact preference form directly on Salesforce which is available to everyone with no login.
• I rarely cover paid extensions, but seeing as CTI is always paid anyway: SF Voice gets internal calling, code-driven accept, hangup, and merging of calls (and support for custom LWC as a result), user-level setup checks to help users, extensions for pre-and post-call behavior, custom field data transfer… For me it blows the current competition out of the water unless you’re comparing purely API-driven call centers.
• Dynamic Forms are available on Mobile in beta
• Custom Address Fields now suck less but the State/Country bullshit still exists.
• LEX Record Edit pages get an undo button per field, but it doesn’t apply to Dynamic Forms, because why lower tech debt when you can have multiple teams working on the same piece of the UI at the same time ?
• The last few releases seem to clearly indicate that CPQ has been folded into Revenue Cloud and might be folded into the Vlocity CPQ at some point. If you’re a customer, you might want to study how to migrate. This is speculation and not backed by any insider knowledge.
• Quotes Can be created with no account or Opportunity but need an account to be converted to Order. I’m not sure I understand why breaking basic CRM dependencies is good but why not.

FLOWS

• Reactivity is here again, still in Beta. Now supports formulas
• DataTable gets search and filtering
• SendEmail can now be automatically be logged but that changes which email limit it counts against so… eh.
• HTTP GET callout GA, also Beta supports POST so your admins can send wrong data to even more systems :D
• If you relied on Field Level Security - based Visibility to not display stuff, you’ll now get errors instead
• No More New Processes. Learn Flow and Migrate
• Orchestrations variable behavior change and can call Mulesoft Actions, as well as give you Tasks in your ToDo. Also add a horribly hacky way to add Comments. Still don’t fix their horrible pricing scheme.

DEVELOPMENT

• It’s a Release Update, but Apex RESTResponse must now be RFC 7230 Compliant, you probably need to check the ones you emit.
• Sets are Iterable now (sometimes)
• Fetch Labels Dynamically at runtime
• Better control over Queuables in both depth and max runtime
• New Komaci tool ensures code can be used in offline environments, combined with Offline Test Harness seems to indicate SF investment in Offline Apps, probably Mobile (requires Mobile App Plus, paid, lol).
• LWS, Light DOM, RefreshView are GA.
• Minor note, but Salesforce is slowly finalizing its internal LWC migration which you can read up more on here
• DOM Changes Volume 2, CSS Super style referencing change how stuff displays
• scoped and dynamic slots out of the casino
• UTAM Browser Extension to ease your Selenium Script writings
• You can now check SPF and DKIM in email Services
• Named Credentials can now be created via the ConnectApi, so maybe you could, using a username and password, create a full SFDX pipeline using JWT using it ?
• RIP OAuth Username-Password Flow, you were insecure but you’ll be missed by all the devs too lazy to setup JWT.

COMMERCE

• Both Commerce experiences get assistants (Setup and Troubleshooting), both of which ensure common setup issues aren’t made.
• Connect REST gets SearchResults and ProductSuggestions APIs to allow customization of those features. Combined with Extensions, it seems the platform is trying to become less a “plug and play” and more of a “build-your-own” framework platform, with additional modules like Payments also being developed on the side.

DOGELAND

• :doge: At a time where contextualised information is sold as the BeSt ThINg EvER, Salesforce has decided calling your AE (we promise, they won’t change 5 times a year) is the best way to collect customer feedback that’ll be ignored
• Account Automated Fields are being retired with no previous deprecation notice, enhancing you
• Tab-Focused Dialogs join the legion of Release Updates that don’t get Released, further enhancing your trust that stuff that gets published is totally something that’s final and important.
• Some Very Requested Feature ! (**applies only to Unlimited Edition)
• :doge: 10 years later, Salutation joins LEX, thank Cthulu for the noise around inclusivity so they prioritized this
• :doge: Celebrate with us, the fact that in 2023 you now only have to run an unsigned .bat file after configuring ZuluJDK to install dataloader, a great upgrade over the 2012 "Just install it". Truly, a win for admins everywhere.
• :doge: Sales Planning takes a leaf out of Case Swarming’s book and publishes the most vapid Release Note in a long while, ensuring no one can know wtf it is. Same for Service Catalog which looks like just some zombie feature from Work.com ?

---

This abridged version was graciously written up by the SF Discord

We have a nice wiki: https://wiki.sfxd.org/

And a linkedin page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sfxd/

Join the ~14000 members in the most active chat-based community around Salesforce these parts of the web at http://join.sfxd.org/

---

Spring '23 Abridged

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The Salesforce Discord Collective Presents:
THE SPRING 23 RELEASE NOTES - ABRIDGED
Now with an extra 10% reduction in content

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CRITICAL STUFF

• blablabla MFA blip bloup. If you read these ARN and you’re STILL not ready honestly you should just be ashamed (or blissful). Rollout Pack.
• Anon APEX only for Core users (by opposition to Experience Users) in new Orgs, is setting in old ones
• That one Email Threading release is now completely changed because the old one was horrible. TL;DR "we threw RefID into a sha256 hasher and called it a day, is secure".

GENERAL STUFF

• Admins can chose who can access Sandboxes and avoid email setup for these users.
• User Access Policies (more info) will make assigning Perm Set Groups / Profiles / Perm Sets to Users individually redundant if they ever become very fleshed out.
• the __Share Table is now viewable witout API calls so you can easily see Who Can See What and Why.
• Einstein Search continues its quest for customizability but depends on Profiles, also allows searching picklists as preferred
• Report Editor in LEX and Classic finally now at parity. 5. years. later. so like when the SF CLI came out lol. Cut 10% off your time to parity instead of your staff IDK
• Picklists Bulk Changes now live from last release
• Standard Objects become Dynamic with Forms available on Lead and Case and Actions on all Standard Objects. Save Options are also migrated from Page Layouts to Dynamic Forms, maybe one day they’ll let us set all DMLOpts via this instead of pre-determined stuff. Dynamic Forms also support Custom Address Fields which suck less but still aren’t really usable now but still isn’t a BUY for me, I’d wait for the squeeze.
• Dynamic Related Lists now have a “View All” button for records, finally ascending from “complete uselessness”
• __GVS added to Global Value Set names. Really, this time, promise we won’t remove it from the release.

SALES, SERVICE

• Dynamic Console Tab Loading for when you can’t download more RAM and your employees love tabs
• Sales can now offer a meeting slot via email if they use Inbox. Doesn’t seem to be tied to the Scheduler license, yay ?
• New Messaging supports FB Messenger, has cool answer component builder also has hidden prechat form builder, can be used for leads, also possibly plays with new product Conversation Miner which analyzes transcripts for common contact reasons.

REPORTS AND DASHBOARDS

• Collections allow Users to sort Reports by themselves, whatever Folder they may be in. Yes they just invented a tagging system. Much wow.
• You can dynamically reference UserIds in Report Filters. This is great for cases where you want to create reports for team leaders, or reports that apply to records that look up to User outside of the Owner fields such as Assigned To.
• New Analytics Notification standard report type shows Report Subscription usage per User, of which the limits have been doubled.
• Dashboards can now have explanatory text and images which is pretty, and have two more filters bringing the count up to five.

FLOWS

• Reactivity is the WotD, with reactive Screen Components. Probably the biggest forward-looking change for Flows this release, tends a bit to LWC capability, introduces complexity regarding potential dirty User-inputed values that could be overwritten.
• *Flows no longer have a 2000 element limit per run, which allows great things and great CPU usage.
• Descriptions on Canvas, for proper Documentation, no excuse for not filling it out now ffs JUST DO IT
• Choice Lookup with no USF (also non-USF table has updated multiselect)
• External Services have larger limits which are better documented and now support HTTP callouts, but it still seems very unstable, so you miiight want to hold off using that. Examples include not supporting enums and wrongly defining variables.
• Event-Based Flows get Static Variables reset between Interviews
• Dynamic Forms for Flow currently allows faster Lookup creation, will probably have more impact in next few releases
• Migrate to Flow tool from Process Builder is updated

DEVELOPMENT

FRONT-END

• Changes in rendering Engine breaks queries on elements with an exact class name and requires update.
• Light DOM still beta, scopes only apply to it now (apart from tons of exceptions) and pseudo-css scopes now work normally
• New and better Conditional Directives lwc:if
• RefreshView API for when you want to update data without refreshing a page
• Refs within the DOM are now a thing
• If you had any doubts that LWR is the future, let those be dispelled. LWR Sites now support record detail components, action bars, contact support forms and CRM Data Search, also has Grid Component and component margin updates, better mobile customization, publishing and mobile LWC suport, better Sites Deployment and error handling, also becomes compatible with B2BCommerce (which has futher mostly updates about LWC compatiblity and customisation). No need to fret though - LWC work in LWR, the main longterm change is to eliminate reliance on Aura, and bring Salesforce to current web standards compatibility.
• Wired Property Debugging no longer requires a Function to return results

BACK-END

• UserMode and ApexTypeImplementor are out of Beta and have minor updates
• DescribeFieldResult can now return the Object it was initialized from much to the joy of anyone who uses it
• Dataweave in APEX available even without Mulesoft, allows using DW scripts that you upload via SFDX, is great for data manipulation, probably won’t be used because too hard to find
• Queue Delays, both Org-Wide and specific allow better handling of long running tasks
• More Bind Variable Methods
• For High-Volume org, Micro-Batching to Process Guest Cases from the Contact Support Form is a godsend, as this means that public Case submissions doesn’t automatically mean “do a custom API form”. Also a release note that’s weirdly super impactful, you can have specific users flagged as having infinite Person Account ownership by creating a PersonAccountOwnerPowerUser object via API. Huge impact for large Experience orgs.
• Flow interview Apex Static Variables reset between Transations

SIDE-END

• lwcRuntimeFlags went like a lot of Salesforce employees and didn’t make the cut.
• Testing keeps getting better with UTAM Salesforce-Native Browser Extension, linting and HTML Generation
• Scale Center is in Beta and allows you to see if you did things so badly it hinders performance.
• Structured Data in Aura and LWR Sites applies to all dev, but has more impact on client-facing marketing and shop pages, allows search engines to find specific pages more easily
• For FSL only, but shows an interesting trend: Offline Capable LWC
• SFDC CLI get tons of updates read’m they good

DOGELAND

• :doge: Publish standard events with no allocations!. I mean two standard event types. Also “Salesforce-published standard events continue to be exempt from the publishing allocation”, so do User-published events count or not ? Who knows !
• :doge:We OpTiMiZed StufF (also it can maybe break your frontend devs lolol winkwink I ain’t putting that in the title just read my note to figure it out lolol)
• :doge: CPQ HAS AN UP… oh.
• :doge: Workflows V2!.. For HVS users only
• :doge: Let’s make it easy to use up your entitlement based subscriptions without telling you lol

---

This abridged version was graciously written up by the SF Discord

We have a nice wiki: https://wiki.sfxd.org/

And a linkedin page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sfxd/

Join the ~12000 members in the most active chat-based community around Salesforce these parts of the web at http://join.sfxd.org/

---

Winter '23 Abridged

---

The Salesforce Discord Collective Presents:
THE WINTER 23 RELEASE NOTES - ABRIDGED
This post is proudly sponsored by no one at all. (@SFXD_BOT)

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CRITICAL STUFF

• If you ignored LWC syntax errors or Template Warnings you now gotta fix em otherwise you’ll get runtime errors. Same if you DARED use Design Tokens that aren’t GA, HOW DARE YOU BE FORWARD FACING ?
• Enhanced Domains change your URLs, and New Events allow you to see if the old URLs are still referenced anywhere. Your objective is for that second list to hit 0.

GENERAL STUFF

• Permission Sets can now contain FLS on field creation and get a new UI, bringing the day they replace Profiles ever closer.
• Tasks get a to-do list ✓
• Custom Address fields are now GA ! Study why they can’t be used in your organisation anyway today
• Dynamic Forms now work on Account, Person Account, Contact, and Opportunity. It’s great news due to the underlying complexity of making it work. It’s also far from perfect due to numerous styling issues (you’ll see if you put them on a page) and some functional issues like button addition and mass modification. As-is my recommendation is “use when necessary, wait for stability if you can instead”.
• Picklists continue getting mass edition love with Inactive Picklist Mass Deletion. Why they chose to name the button “delete unused values” instead of “inactive”, only Benioff knows.
• You can now clone Lightning Apps meaning if you use a lot of components on a page and you need to make a variation thereof for other people you now can.
• Global Value Set API Names now get appended with __gvs to avoid conflicts with other stuff removed from release
  
• If you ever were surprised with Sandboxes behaving weirdly, know that you can now see if your sandbox is a pre-release one in the Setup.
• Territories now handle Leads but still kinda suck
• Event Releases from last release are now GA and you can now stream to AWS Eventbridge (but those events can’t be queried)
• In Spring 22, Salesforce announced "Case Swarming in Slack", which seems to be a Skill-based approach to Case Resolution, kind of like Omnichannel, but internally. In Winter 23 they now release the concept fully with no explanation whatsoever of how it works, so here’s a blog from July telling you what it’s supposed to do and an internal example from last November to go a bit further.
• Last Release I talked about something called Messaging for In App or Web. Seems this is the future of LiveAgent ? Still lots of movement on that SKU again, updates which are pretty useful and includes wait times (also for omni-channel, that one) search, attachments, jump to message, and tab header integration. If I was doing a LiveAgent implementation now I’d probably wait a bit.
• Einstein Bot Learning Map looks like a nice way to get on board Bots.

TOOLS

• DevOps Center is now live and Beta. Install Guide Here, issues here. It’s not complete yet, so don’t go crazy on your production for now.
• Code Builder is Live. This is useful for Devs, but also for technically-inclined Admins. Give feedback here, view documentation here, pray with us that the hourly limit doesn’t make it to production here
• The Data Loader now has its own download page, don’t look for it in Setup.
• A new Permission Set assistant, official but hosted on appexchange, makes perms management easier.

REPORTING

• Reports get some love both in function and UI, even on mobile. Slack integration also looks nice.
• Forecasting now allows filters on custom fields and custom calculated columns as well as pretty colors
• CRM Analytics (ye ole tool of golden renamings) get a slew of QoL upgrades but mostly get impressive snowflake reporting updates

FLOWS

• New In and Not In operators allow stuff like SELECT Id FROM Contact WHERE Id IN AccountList which is a very, VERY nice upgrade (which is a bit half baked, you can only do IN text collections, not records). But also adds complexity.
• Standard Data Table and Multi-Lookup Selection Components 🎉
• The Formula Builder has stopped sucking, and you can use ISCLONE in Record Triggered Flows.
• You can Cut and Paste elements and view Go To connections easily now
• Flows take a leaf out of Process Builder’s book and allow updates to records related to the Origin in the Update Component. How does this impact performance ?
• Some UI Updates That Look Nice
• Testing is now GA, also adds testing for Scheduled Paths, more information here. Mandatory Tests when ?

DEVELOPMENT

• Auth-related: SAML Version Upgrade might break existing SSO. Review Release Update. Also in Auth world, Named Credentials get a nice upgrade.
• Queries are more powerful and return more data, stored longer
• Lightning Web Security is now default for now orgs. LWS is the forward-facing replacement for Lightning Locker, applicable only to LWC, and… supports iframes???. Comparison Here. LWS also distorts Javascript APIs that it deems insecure which you can find in the Distortion Viewer with its corrected and more secure according to our overlords distorted behavior.
• As called in the last release notes, mixed Shadow DOM is now here, and light DOM also allows you integrate with ad trackers third party sites better. Documentation about DOMs here.
• Modal Component provides user-interaction-mandatory pop-up capabilities.
• You can Call Flows from LWC using a standard component
• APEX user-mode gets updated with more operations.
• Assertions get WAY better with System.Assert class by type
• A security hole is getting plugged if you used Global Constructors in Managed Packages
• You can now access the standard Email Composer via LWC

EXPERIENCES

• LWR Sites (so Build Your Own and Microsites) get Partial Deployments thanks to Digital Experience Metadata now being changeset-able. This may be a trend for other Experiences (or could be a sign that most Experiences will migrate to LWR at some point?). LWR also gets easy Download links for Content, Document, and Attachments and Google Analytics 4
  
• You can iFrame your Experience and whitelist the external domain now.

B2B and B2B2C Commerce

• You can add a store to an existing Experience
• They’re making promotions less of pain but you still have no real way to test a promotion before shipping it live lmao
• Languages in B2C stores pretty much require you to have licenses for it to work, and once again lack any sort of testing to ensure you don’t mess up translated content in 25 languages.

DOGELAND

• :doge: If you're going to ignore what your customers want despite already curating the list of stuff you're offering, maaaaaybe don't ask for our opinion.
• :doge: The amount of Release Updates that get shelved or completely reworked, and half-baked “products”, over the past releases is too darn high. This is an ENTERPRISE-FOCUSED COMPANY you should be targeting stability for crying out loud. Like let's speak about the Flow tests, it's a good feature but if it was Brioche I wouldn't be eating it, it's RAW. Checkbox fields are still buggy, can't add related test data, can't run with apex tests/suites, aren't surfaced anywhere besides in the flow builder for its flow...
• :doge: More fun than bad but the Slack ‘CRM Analytics for Slack’ app "isn’t just for CRM Analytics anymore.", which yields a situation where a function named after a license named after an acquired software (Tableau) now has no bearing on the original software… or license. I’m sure it’ll get renamed to ‘Analytics Engagement’ or ‘Chat Analytics Embedded’ or maybe ‘Quip’ IDK
• :doge: Salesforce Scheduler still doesn’t say it’s paid or not part of Core. Data Pipelines either, and they put Sales Cadences in “Core Sales Features” :chefskiss:
• :doge: CMS becomes "enhanced"… and still seems to be Confluence 10 years ago. I have no idea who the target audience for this is.
• :doge: The Swarm thing is somewhat insane in how obscure it is. Maybe actually tell us how your thing works and what it’s meant for ?

---

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We have a nice wiki: https://wiki.sfxd.org/

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---

Summer '22 Abridged

---

The Salesforce Discord Collective Presents:
THE SUMMER 22 RELEASE NOTES - ABRIDGED
We’re proud to announce our rebranding to Einstein SFXD CRM Release Notes Capture Abridginator 3000.

---

CRITICAL STUFF

• User PII access checkbox change, is part of Enhanced Personal Information Management, important for GDPR-centric orgs.
• Formulas get a SWEET update with more functions and a max compile size of 15000 up from 5000. People using twitter have been hyped for a month
• Edge case, but still critical - if you have an old org, check if your Email Address is Verified or your email sending capabilities will be limited by Winter '23
• My dream from summer '21 is getting realized with Flows now being testable via Flows. This will probably become mandatory as Flow complexity continues to scale over the next five years.
• If you didn’t enable it yet, changes in CPU Time measuring for Flows might lead to complex Flows failing. Check your org.

GENERAL STUFF

• MFA soon ™. Being lazy here because no changes whatsoever. Is it 2023? Has Salesforce finished doing its updates on SSO MFA enforcement ? No ? Cool. Also you can bypass MFA now :shrug: Not even putting it in Critical anymore.
• Admins can now create Custom Address Fields. AWESOME! … but those waiting for it since 2007 might have already retired. /shrug. You might also want to check the Doges section of these ARN.
• When setting up Search, the Search Manager allows you to check which objects and fields are available to users.
• Restriction Rules minor updates, become more coherent with the Platform design and now support External Objects but some of that wording scares me - “Admins are responsible for ensuring that rules they create on external objects don’t negatively impact performance in Salesforce or in the external system.” say what ?
• Picklists get awesomely better duplicate handling, bulk edition OH YEAH, easier inactive values purging. For those who don’t know what the “Bound” and “Unbound” references are, this concept was first introduced in Summer '21 and TL;DR too many inactive values bad.
• The phasing out of classic continues with Related Lists no longer needing the Classic Page Layout edition to be displayed in LEX if you use the new "Dynamic Related List - Single" component, but curb your enthusiasm.
  
• Forecasts get picklist, currency, number filtering instead of just RecordType, and Multicurrency parenthetical display support
• EAC gets Manual Record Linking Override
• Sales cloud for Slack gets released, forgets link to actual content but not in another page in the same release note, actually looks nice, is included starting with Enterprise, has flow plugin
• There’s a lot of movement on a Service element I haven’t really heard of before, Messaging for In-App and Web. Nothing critical apart if you use Whatsapp from Salesforce but I’d keep an eye out in future releases.  It seems it's a persistency-focused LiveAgent with SMS handling. I'd keep a good watch on this if you're Chat or Messaging centric.
  
• There's a new SKU called Subscription Management that despite its section in the Notes isn't part of Revenue Cloud, but an add-on to Sales Cloud. Without too much surprise it allows management of Subscriptions as well as an API for it.

REPORTING

• The Multi-field inline edit is now GA - re-highlighting this because it’s awesome. In addition, Salesforce now tries to help you define report types for Objects you select, has a better Analytics homepage, and now has MEDIAN(). It’s a good couple releases of Reporting fans
• Revenue Insights can be used without Forecasts

FLOWS

• Formulas can now be used as Flow Entry Conditions. Combined with the above Compile Size updates, that makes for LOVELY combinations.
• The way Flows evaluate Merge Fields stored in records changes. If you were using this workaround for some merges, you'll need to rely on APEX instead, or do a GET in your Flow.
• Flow team fixed their doge from spring22. I still disagree with the design concept but at least it’s clean now. Flow Explorer also gets QoL nice updates
• Orchestrations can now be Deployed leading to you not having to just YOLO in prod, also get nice QoL updates
• Visual updates include Section Headers in Screens, Rick Astley icons for your Invocable Actions, goto connectors (someone REALLY likes BASIC principles)
• Omni-Channel Flow Routing now supports checking availability

DEVELOPMENT

• APEX gets user-mode which is somewhat of an easier way to handle things that stripinaccessible started addressing - more info with this deck by C. Peterson.
• Using third-party libs in LWC Light DOM is now GA, hooray DOM manipulation!
• Alert, Confirm, Prompt native API deprecation lead to new LWC Modules to be used.
• External Services can now be called from APEX, great to avoid duplicate functionality in programmatic and declarative.
• Synthetic Shadow updates on assignedSlot and elementsFromPoint might break implementations, need review, will be expended to Mixed Shadow in future release. Note differences between default DOMs in Lightning Out or LWC Open Source, versus Lightning Experience and Experience Cloud.
  
• Datatable Virtual Rendering loads only rows you look at so you can load huge datatables before MFA gets enforced in reasonable times.
• Einstein OCR allows you to get Invoice Records from Images, up to 2000 free per month, after which you need to buy more usage. Yes, that’s content from three domains just to get you that information.
  
• GraphQL is now here, allowing your apps to decide which data they want to receive and how. Blog Posts exploring the concept.
• Events gets TONS of updates. Pub/Sub (gRPC) is here as well as a Native Integration to Amazon EventBridge, making CometD somewhat obsolete and easing transition to events-based models. CDC and PE both get Filters, and PE get Custom Channel grouping.
• Partioned Domains make knowing which org you are in easier, may require AllowList updates.
• @AuraEnabled is getting some annotation upgrades, so this is an interesting move.... preemptive architectural support for platform features beyond Digital Experiences?
• Hahahaha, they finally fixed overloading @AuraEnabled.
• Uhhhh, Functions have their own release notes...
• Lots of new LDS adapters, they're investing heavily in....integrating with analyticsWaveApi *cough* CRM Analytics *cough*.
• Be aware LWC's refreshApex is "deprecated for non-apex usage" (not sure what this means) on May 1 2023. Not sure what "support for ... of the function ends"... means yet. Guess we'll see next year!

B2B2C2BCOMMERCECRAZE

• Salesforce just casually made most of your demo setup redundant
• B2BCB2BCB Commerce, or whatever it’s called now, supports promotions
• Custom Payment component now exists… ? wasn’t that the case before ? Also better tax handling for non-US countries

WAVE EINSTEIN ANA… TableauCRM CRM ANALYTICS

• Cross. Joins.
• Ability to delete connection between Nodes in Recipes. Maybe the Flow team will steal this idea?!
• A bunch of updates to the search capabilities in Recipes, should make navigating large Recipes much easier.
• Always happy to see Faceting getting some love. Can now Facet SOQL queries on the same Objects without modifying JSON.
• Added NULL handling in SAQL making your queries more accurate.

CPQ

• bis repetita - oh wait no it's under Revenue Cloud now ? I give up.

DOGELAND

• :doge: So those Custom Address Fields… Don’t support text input in State/Country, can’t be used for DISTANCE(), don’t work in Flows (as a Compound field, the individual constituent fields do) or BULK API, and you can’t localize the labels of Street/City etc. I’m sure it’ll be great some day, but as of right now it’s a bit ehhh. Wait for update before widespread use.
• :doge: You can Grant access to your data for Einstein stuff, but what they give you in return isn’t documented at all, nor is the potential impact to GDPR. Why would you turn it on? What will you get out of it, outside of potential lawsuits? Who knows ! Maybe they’ll publish a release note about it one day.
• :doge: Salesforce Scheduler keeps making it hard to know it’s a paid add-on, despite good feature releases. Data Pipelines is also in Salesforce Overall but AT LEAST THEY SAY IT’S PAID seriously. And why is a Sales Cloud SKU part of Revenue?
  
• :doge: Netflix’s adding ads, and Salesforce’s pushing Performance as the new Enterprise with lotsa added features for Performance and Unlimited, which is great, but let’s name the SKU used to add those features “Sales Cloud Included”, because fuck transparency, aye?
• :doge: Why the hell would you ever bundle Mulesoft or Omnistudio releases with Flow release ?
• :doge: RefId to summer 23 lmao

---

This abridged version was graciously written up by the SF Discord
We have a nice wiki: https://wiki.sfxd.org/
And a linkedin page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sfxd/
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Join the ~10500 members in the most active chat-based community around Salesforce these parts of the web at http://join.sfxd.org/

---

Spring '22 Abridged

---

The Salesforce Discord Collective Presents:
THE SPRING 22 RELEASE NOTES - ABRIDGED
Written by people who think having a proper RSS feed on official release documentation shouldn’t be this hard. (@SFXD_BOT)

---

CRITICAL STUFF

• Mandatory MFA is still coming and now has a Question-based readiness check. The last two releases we highlighted that it wasn’t exactly the best thought-out rollout. Salesforce seems to agree as they are "enforcing" the "mandatory" part this month legally, but aren’t actually activating it forcefully until EoY, and it’ll be deactivatable until… 2023. They’re releasing ways to not use TOTP already anyway.
  Maybe that team and the Case Threading one can go have coffee and publish notes on how to do better rollouts. That would be an interesting feedback loop.
• Minor critical Flow update: if you use Two-Column Layouts, migrate to Sections ASAP

GENERAL STUFF

• Admins get notified if a page takes more than 4 seconds to load on average. Great, but the fact that this is a common enough occurence tells you how well things go when you give non-specialists access to custom page builders with no load checking.
• Pardot gets scripts in landing pages and redirects for unpublished Pages which should make quite a few marketeers happy.
• Salesforce Voice becomes the first CTI to factor in Agent Omnichannel Work Capacity when routing, allows easier Supervisor Call Monitoring, better status handling between SF and Amazon, and a better transfer UI. Probably the most loved feature this release outside of Flows, with stellar feature releases.
• Omni-channel Flows are GA and powerful. Probably makes skill based routing kinda redundant long term.
• Lightning Sync be dead, you can turn it off

REPORTING

• Reports get some very nicely thought Quality of Life updates, with better Report Type selection, and multi-line data editing in reports
• Dashboards get Dynamic Gauge Charts to the great joy of managers who can check Targets easily now

FLOWS

• External Services now support OpenAPI 3.0 and unsupported Data Types mapping- meaning you can now (try) to integrate directly with most things that are documented in Swagger. Cool, seeing as Guest Users can use those now.
• You can open Subflows from Main Flows, which makes that function much better (but still missing an easy way of viewing all the ways a Subflow is called to make it really useful)
• Collections can now be used as a choice option and can also be filtered, which isn’t exactly a map (I still want maps plz) but is still a VERY powerful improvement. Nice.
• Flow Trigger Explorer, a better view of Record-Triggered Flows that Admins will love, as well as this minor update that allows viewing Flow information in browser tab names, and the ability to shortcut Flow elements. Screen Readers are also supported now
• Orchestrator allow distribution of labor via queue assignation, and become even more code-like with custom Evaluation methods Flows that you can invoke call from Orchestrator and Debugging, Deployment. For Admins, you can now view Orchestrations and Work Items to ensure things are running smoothly (or cancel them if they don’t).
• The bell tolls for Workflows which can now be converted to Flows (beta).
• You can define Orders of execution for Flows. I am visibly alone in hating this change, but I still say that relying on specific orders of execution for Admin-built automation is a highway to useless complexity. If you’re at the point where you need actions to be sequential, they should be refactored into their own logic which forces the order. Fight me.
• Speaking of Order of Execution, Flow API v54 changes the After-Save order, specifically related to Entitlements

DEVELOPMENT

• Packagers get a GREAT Documentation Upgrade, much easier to navigate and review
• Write More Robust UI Tests with UTAM
• LWR comes to Node.JS. Get your LWCs on local webservers!
• Light DOM now available for better script injection, also applies to Experiences
• LWCSecurity kills Locker, is future, has new tools to ease seeing security settings
• Full-fledged Interface Support means more manageable code for enterprise-class projects

EXPERIENCES

• Guest User Permissions Crackdown continues.
• You still can’t delete Experiences but you can archive them so they don’t count against your Experiences limit.
• You can access labels more easily from Experiences. This release note also wins the “moar JPG for ants” award for its screenshot.
• Role-based licenses get Optimization enabled by default which is meant to reduce the amount of Roles created in single-contact Accounts with Roles.
• LWR Experiences can now be translated, allow searching within Components, get a Marketing Cloud connected data collection form

CPQ

*

DOGELAND

• :doge: Salesforce keeps pushing Scheduler as part of “Overall Features”, also Paid Einstein Stuff, hell why not add Paid Data Pipelines. Literally just advertising in Release Notes. It’s still disgraceful.
• :doge: Salesforce continues rebranding features no one cares about and makes it easier to buy licenses at market price lol to maybe stop hiring AEs
• :doge: “We didn’t publish anything but here’s something our marketing team drafted back in December so we don’t lose our precious Release Notes spot”.
• :doge: “We fused the help sections of two slightly different things and made knowing which license you need harder”
• :doge: Scoping Rules are so confusing that even the team can’t explain it well “yeah it doesn’t restrict access, it just hides records, but I mean by default only, you know?”
• :doge: A few people used FSL a bit too well and will now have to pay for the same function
• :doge: If you don’t want your user to see ads helpful suggestions you might want to deactivate in-app guidance which just gets auto-enabled

---

This abridged version was graciously written up by the SF Discord

We have a nice wiki: https://wiki.sfxd.org/

And a linkedin page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sfxd/

Join the ~8500 members in the most active chat-based community around Salesforce these parts of the web at http://join.sfxd.org/

---

Winter '22 Abridged

---

The Salesforce Discord Collective Presents:
THE WINTER 22 RELEASE NOTES - ABRIDGED
When you gaze into the Release Notes, the Release Notes gaze into you

---

CRITICAL STUFF

• Mandatory MFA is still coming. Last release we highlighted that it wasn’t exactly the best thought-out rollout. Things are getting better documented now, more Identity Verifications will be available, and there’s a full-featured multi-lingual rollout pack you can download to ease change management. There’s still concerns for now if you’re a Managed Services shop though.
• Developers consume even more coffee than usual because of Updated Locale Formats and more timezones resulting in old (but bad) code potentially breaking (if it was bad) and more locales to support (which is never fun). The DeveloperName field also now requires either View Setup, or View DeveloperName permissions to be viewable. I expect this’ll have nice, fun impact on developments around the world, resulting in soaring prices for Coffee stock #superstonk
• External Users will see even less stuff about other users. This will become mandatory in a year, so start using this ASAP to mitigate impact.
• Product2 now subject to Sharing Settings and Sharing Rules (Release Updates), defaults to Private for External Users. Impact for Subscription, Ordering, and Renewal-based Experiences to be expected. Test in Sandbox.

GENERAL STUFF

• Scoping Rules, which filter down search results, make a great complement to Restriction Rules, which filter down record access. This continues the trend of closing down permissions instead of opening them up. Cool, but also great for spaghetti.
• Einstein Search allows Profile-level Object targeting so Finance users search invoices by default and Sales search Opps.
• In-App Guidance now has Targeted Prompts - as a quick reminder you get three Walkthroughs for free and there’s a nice FAQ. IAG also gets a few updates like RT-specific prompts and Prompts in Setup
• Dashboards can have Dynamic Gauges meaning the Max is based on a field, meaning this is awesome.
• Einstein Activity Capture can now create Events as Activities for your reporting joy but watch out for Storage limits. Also tries to avoid you sharing sensitive info, whether external or internal
• My Domain is mandatory and has more features that also restrict non-domain logins or speed up resolution so TL;DR you gotta activate that.
• Omnichannel can now open related records as well as the main work item for more context, and gets Planning by Shifts
• Inline Editing on Reports gets easier and on more data types.
• You can route Service Cloud Voice Calls with Omnichannel Flows. How cool this is cannot be overstated - previously you had to have Omnichannel on one side, your CTI on the other, and pray they play nice (this feature is part of the Omnichannel Flows routing thing from last release that I loved already). Voice also has client-side call recording approval and becomes Desk Phone Compatible.
• Tasks get PK Chunking for TaskRelation, a new CompletedDateTime and a new Sorting order

FLOWS

• Orchestrator is out of Beta. UnofficialSF has some nice documentation about it, including a tutorial series. TL;DR Orchestrator flows are Flows that create Stages for you and handle their update and completion status, allowing you to call a Core Action (incl. Flows, Global Actions, etc) on any step, and handle automation based on step completion. It’s like an overcharged Approval Process. They can be embedded in pages or triggered via record updates. They’re great.
• Record-Triggered Flows get a lot of love with a new Trigger UI, Scheduled Path updates and Subflows (SUBFLOWS EVERYWHERE!!!) — Complex logic in Record Triggered Automation here we come!
• External Services get Native Mulesoft Action Support and Different API limits which are actually worse if you have more than 25 external services registered, but better otherwise. They can also be called from Record Triggered Flows via an Async path, so your admins can now mess with your non-Salesforce systems as well when they do a data load be more productive
• Debugging keeps getting better! Event Monitoring clients get a bonus
• QoL: Auto-Layout is less punishing. Also You can rename the standard buttons which is great for UX. Choices get some love
• My personal QoL favourite: the Roll Back Element removes previous DMLs on fault, which means I don’t need to create all those Delete elements manually.
• Run Flows for Experience Users is being retired. You’ll get more accurate permissions soon ™

As a quick reminder, you now have:

• Orchestrator, which is a meta-flow management Engine
• Screen Flows, which display & collect information and take actions based on user Interaction
• Record-Triggered Flows, which take action based on record information on DML operations, whether BEFORE or AFTER saved
• Scheduled Flows, which schedule a Flow Interview for later, run as batch on a subset of records defined in the Schedule, and group records with similar operations together even if they are in different Interviews
• Scheduled Paths, which trigger from a Record Triggered Flow, and schedule a Flow Interview for later, and group records with similar operations together even if they are in different Interviews
• Async Paths from Flows, which allows you to call External Services, and are processed in their own batch

There’s quite a few help articles about this, but you might want to train your Admins into all these delta variants as otherwise the terminology might get confusing.

DEVELOPMENT

• Salesforce Functions, aka evergreen, aka lambdas for Salesforce, can now be Mocked in APEX
• Lightning Web Security (beta) replaces Lightning Locker for LWC, allows cross-namespace component use, is SES compatible. Also allows you to use LWS for your LWC on your LWR sites. At some point we’ll do the entire LWAlphabet, but I guess Google would copyright that.
• Dynamic Interactions allow Devs to expose events in their components, which will then be used by Admins via the App Builder to make the components react to actions taken on a Lightning Page or a List
• Performance of both Pages and LWC is now easily measurable
• If you do more than 2500 actions in a boxcar request you’ll now get an error, instead of horrible slowness. Tl;DR Salesforce forcing you to write less shitty code.
• Secure Static Resources for Lightning Components release update is delayed indefinitely with the best message to that effect ever: “The release update won’t be enforced in its present form. Don’t enable it.”
• Packaging now allows removing Metadata elements from 2GP, and converting 1GP to 2GP is coming. A CI/CD wind blows over all new projects. Also, Appexchange Packages no longer eat up your CDC limits, and you can Package Flows that can be overriden
• You can do Data Binding for CMS content in LWC for Experiences

EXPERIENCES

• Microsites are a new CMS-centric landing-page template . I would wait until Site Archival comes out of Pilot to use it extensively though.
• Audiences in your Audience so you can audience your audience. Yes I do this joke a lot. I still like it.
• LWR is the future, but Aura sites are here to stay for a while. Advise looking into LWR as you can - it will become bigger as time goes on.
• Salesforce now serves Experiences via its CDN, but as a tradeoff you now need Domain-specific Certs. Custom Domains are also routed via Edge Network (this). TL;DR faster loading and resolving times.
• Experience Buttons and Forms can now be branded declaratively with no CSS overrides. :)

INDUSTRY PACKAGES

• FSL gets QoL updates with templated shifts, timezone conversions, better date navigation and recurrence planning. Also allows customers to Self-Serve appointment scheduling via Flows -tutorial here
• There’s a new CSG Customer 360 guide. I almost put this in dogeland because of the formatting, but if you go to the actually Guides Homepage and then check the different guides available it’s still a GREAT resource. So… 2/10 on the release note, 7/10 on the actual Guides concept. Let’s see what they do next.

DOGELAND

• :doge: I still say putting Salesforce Scheduler in the “Overall” section is false advertising just throw it in its own section or do an entire section “Salesforce Add-ons” it shouldn’t be that hard to know if something’s free or not chrissakes
• :doge: A cute one for once but the Bots team tried to pull a sneaky one and dusted off some notes from last release and shipped those again lol
• :doge: I love Orchestrator but if you’re selling me business insights and they’re not viewable by my C-levels on a dashboard they ain’t v useful
• :doge: ‘Pipeline Inspection lets you create custom filters, watch important opportunities, and see which deals are less likely to close in the current month.’ which are awesome features if you have Performance or Unlimited licenses. Seriously. Every release it’s the same thing. Performance & Unlimited are FAR from the most popular editions, why are you shoving release notes for a product that requires a license with DOUBLE THE DARN COST at the top of your “Sales” section ???
• :doge: Service gets a new activatable module "Incident Management which contains new standard objects and I think a Slack integration ? For a Release Note announcing a product this is woefully underdescriptive.
• :doge: I won’t even comment anymore lol

---

This abridged version was graciously written up by the SF Discord

We have a nice wiki: https://wiki.sfxd.org/

And a linkedin page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sfxd/

Join the ~6500 members in the most active chat-based community around Salesforce these parts of the web at http://join.sfxd.org/

---

Summer '21 Abridged

---

The Salesforce Discord Collective Presents:
THE SUMMER 21 RELEASE NOTES - ABRIDGED
:doge: to the moon 🚀

---

CRITICAL STUFF

• Multi Failure Authentication will be mandatory by Feb. 1, 2022. Yes, this can impact some API Users, and yes, criteria for MFA will probably change. Yes, MFA is a great theory but this application isn't great. Yup, They've learned nothing from the emailRefId debacle.
• Omnichannel can Use Flows to route Cases. Yes it’s as insanely good as it sounds and later (tm) you’ll be able to route calls with it too.
• Also, see “Sharing” down below.

GENERAL STUFF

Includes Sales & Service stuff because those sections were too short to stand alone.

• EVEN MOAR FIELDS EVERYWHERE
• Recently Viewed Lists Now Support Actions much to everyone’s celebration. I was going to put confetti on this page and then remembered I’m not running Lightning here. Yet.
• Einstein Search is now GA, is still free, is available in Essentials, and works with Knowledge Articles. NICE.
• In-App Guidance now includes three free walkthroughs. The function hasn’t changed much but the fact you can actually use it is GREAT. Just don’t have more than three walkthroughs.
• Quick Actions can now invoke LWC either via ScreenAction (no more Aura wrapper) or Action (literally LWC as QuickAction !)
• You can now create Reports on Emails to see how useless they are it’s 2021 people barely read non-operational emails anymore your awesome email campaign statistics
• Picklist Behavior Changes which have more impact as org size goes up. Check if there’s any problem with your processes
• Your Bookeeping will thank you: keep better track of undue license expenses thanks to License Metrics. You AE can help you buy more if you don’t have enough saved up. Or even if you do ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯
• Bots continue to assimilate language , easier multilanguage support, and can answer with Articles from KAV. ALL YOUR OPPS ARE BELONG TO US.
• Forecasts now support custom fields and measures, and coupled with Pipeline Inspection Sales can now have a huge benefit from Forecasts.
• QoL updates: you can edit reports inline, LWC changes now show up in setup audit trail and Mass List Actions now work in Split View, also Inbox can now use a service account for Exchange so all your users don’t need to do the setup themselves, and internal email opens don’t get tracked anymore

• Salesforce is bringing its least-used features to LEX so it can finally kill off classic in a few years

• If you were an existing Amazon Connect client, you can now use Service Cloud Voice with your exising account

• Teams integration now GA. Expect a super urgent project to integrate it and never be used.
• 2009 just called and LinkedIn Sales Navigator now has a NATIVE INTEGRATION wooooo LinkedIn ain’t preventing integrations anymore congrats LinkedIn I guess for being a mediocrely passable thing to integrate with yay
• Salesforce has done a few updates for accessibility and ux ☺

SHARING

Yup, sharing gets its own section this time, even if it’s short. One, there’s some nice updates to QoL. Two, the way sharing has evolved in the past 2 years means that it’s time to focus on it. So, yeah, sharing section.

• See Record Access Reasons in the UI. You don’t have to query the __Share tables anymore! SO. MANY. EASY. FIXES. Probably the biggest QoL of the release.
• Restriction Rules (Beta) join Permission Set Groups in various ways to restrict permissionsin Salesforce. Muting perm sets for Metadata - Restriction Rules for Data.
• Permission Set and Permission Set Group Assignments can now have an expiration date, meaning you can grant temporary rights to users.

Yes, this looks awesome. It does, however, pose a problem as it adds yet another layer of complexity in permission handling. Remember this ? That was already hard for most administrators. Now you add Perm Set groups, Muting Perm Sets, Restriction Rules. Thankfully they added the UI level Share parsing.

What you probably want to do right now if you’re an existing organization where Sharing and Permissions are important is to start Designing Personas of your users, and seeing if leveraging these new features can improve maintenance. If you’re a new admin, a new consultant, or on a greenfield project, double the time you allocated to permissions definition and actually ask yourself how you would design this now. It’ll matter for the long run.

FLOWS

• External Services are now INSANELY GOOD. First, you can consume ANY Swagger (or OpenAPI 2) API. Second, You can consume BIG APIs now. And third, you can TEST APEX HTTP MOCKS with them. IMAGINE IF THEY LET ADMINS WRITE FLOWS TO TEST APEX !!!! You could actually have real business user stories, editable by Admins, that test your developer’s code. LIT.
• Record-Triggered Flows get a lot of <3, with ISCHANGED, ISNEW, and PRIORVALUE being available and DEBUGGING being available as well <3
• Default Values for any Picklist in your Screens
• Debugging keeps getting better with autolayout debugging, failed flow list view and more clarity on DML Transactions
• You can add fields from Objects to screens without creating the variable, getting the record, and then displaying it manually. It’s a very nice shortcut.
• Collections can be sorted but we still don’t have Maps which is the only thing I really want with collections plz gimme a map to Maps in Flows =’(
• A nice QoL adjustment: Required Picklists are now less hell to do
• Let’s add UPDATE elements in your before flows.... even though they’ll be dropped on compile… for coherence reasons I guess. Not a fan but eh why not.

DEVELOPMENT

• Apex Unit Testing With Flow And External Services, see second bullet point of “Flows” section.
• force:createRecord now allows Dependent Picklist Default Values
• SLDS now allows you to create custom styling hooks and confirms, again, that HTML, CSS and DOM changes may break automated testings
• Salesforce Functions is now publicly open as Beta. You might remember them as Evergreen. Would I use this in prod, or even sandbox, yet ? Nah. Would I research it for fun ? HELL YASS. Yes, this is a copy from the last RN but it’s GA now.
• Service cloud Voice toolkit is now available in LWC and packageable
• Events now publish their UUIDs so you can identify them faster better harder stronger ( and establish async origin/lineage )
• You can now deploy a Component and a Label leveraged by it without doing pushing them individually
• Privileged Scripts can bypass the Shadow DOM. Great for Google, Facebook, and other such trackers… Yay ?
• You can use –dxp styling hooks in your LWC to allow Admins to personalize them via the Experience Builder.

PARDOT

• Pardot now has great API docs made by a team that obviously cares. Thanks people.
• Object Sync is now GA and allows you to sync visitor data to make it available for Tableau
• Einstein now allows you to Send Emails at the best time per prospect and qualify your accounts

DOGELAND

• :doge: I’d like to thank Salesforce for putting a paid add-on directly on the FIRST PAGE OF THEIR RELEASE NOTES SECTION IN “GENERAL ENHANCEMENTS” seriously can you stop this please.
• :doge: Salesforce REALLY wants you to like the new Release Notes website. Can’t filter by Paid or not though
• :doge: Use External Data for Maps! This change applies to Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic for Professional, Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited, and Developer editions. *(if you pay the $4000/month/connection that Salesforce Connect costs)
• :doge: Salesforce Anywhere Is Dead, long live Quip Salesforce Anywhere
• :doge: Vlocity Salesforce Industries present Data Engine, Decision Table, and Batch Management, available in Enterprise, Professional, and Unlimited editions, or Enterprise, Performance, and Unlimited editions, and only if you have Financial Services Cloud, Rebate Management, or Loyalty Management… or Rebate Management or Loyalty Management. Nah that’s not confusing we swear.

OTHER

• Experiences become a potential replacement to your website with redirects from non-Salesforce links back to your Experience and quite a few SEO enhancements. Pair this with their new Guided Community Creation for Support and you can have yourself a quick and easy support website.
• HSTS can now be turned on for your Domains, which is great for industries that require a lot of security.
• FSL gets the concept of Briefcases back, with a new builder. It’s great, looks neat, and also make me nostalgic. Too bad it’s FSL only.
• Conversation Insights (stuff to make your calls more efficient and logging them as well) is now available as a standalone product outside of HVS and looks cool.

---

This abridged version was graciously written up by the SF Discord

We have a nice wiki: https://wiki.sfxd.org/

And a linkedin page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sfxd/

Join the ~5600 members in the most active chat-based community around Salesforce these parts of the web at http://join.sfxd.org/

---

Spring '21 Abridged

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The Salesforce Discord Collective Presents:
THE SPRING 21 RELEASE NOTES - ABRIDGED
As Exciting as the new Samsung WF50R8500A release

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CRITICAL STUFF

• CRUD permissions fully removed from Guest User. Last release, they only set it to FALSE. Yes, it’s always been good practice to not have Unauthenticated Users view and delete your data on a public endpoint. Yes, we already called it last release. Yes, some of y’all decided "eh i’ll just turn it back on". Well now you can’t. FIX. DEM. PERMS.

GENERAL STUFF

• Official Release Notes move to a slightly better looking but slower website. Doesn’t change the hidden advertisement for paid features though.
• Dynamic Forms check Dupes before save you time. I wanted to reuse the word “save” to make the sentence shorter, realized it wasn’t intelligible, and committed anyway.
• In-App Guidance gets snooze capabilities, and you can now share them manually to someone. Trailhead also now is present in Salesforce, to ease User Onboarding. All of these should be free of myTrailhead licensing.

SALESFORCE CORE

• Recently Viewed now supports Actions, making the view less useless great again ffs I give up on the joke here useful.
• Opportunity Products can now be the Parent of a Relationship This was listed for Winter21, pulled (with actually great communication as highlighted in the thread), and is now available. Yay :)
• Lightning Email Templates are now set to replace ye olden classic ones. Considerations to be read
• Dashboards now expose filters as URL parameters so you can actually do “dynamic”-ish dashboard filters.
• Dynamic Actions now available on mobile. To avoid further confusion with Dynamic Dashboards, we’d like to offer to Rebrand it to Lightning Actions, can’t go wrong with that, guaranteed no confusion. Yessir.
• New Limit on inactive picklist values. Great for people that don’t sanitize data before loading it to SF. I’m looking at YOU, Rob. You know what you did.
• Enhanced Domains change how My Domains work a bit, required reading for users, some nice perks.
• Help Texts go BRRR but don’t go <BR/> which is nice but also too bad ^Please ^let ^^me ^^^line ^^^^break

SERVICE

• Service Cloud Voice QoL changes include some good stuff, but the real thing is their new Documentation including a learning portal. Also their API changes so if you’re one of the two devs that already used it already, read that.
• Einstein Bots support more languages (some more stuff in Pilot) and Predictions can be turned on with fewer Transcripts available
• That Email RefId update is now delayed by a year because turns out they didn’t think people had automation building the RefId. :Kekw:
• Minor nice change: you can now change NoReply email addresses on some Service notifications.

FLOWS

• Record-Triggered Flows can now have Delayed Actions but I find the example they give really unfortunate - for one week before the Opp Close date, you should use a Scheduled Flow that queries records matching specific criteria instead, which will avoid the undue Flow Scheduled Interviews. Great for low-delay dynamic dates though.
• PriorValue in Record-Triggered Flows to most admin’s glorious celebration.
• SendEmail with Rich text from Templates. So Pretty.
• Screen Flows get nice polish with pretty screens, many columns and the ability to control how Screens behave on revists
• Debugging gets better and supports Scheduled Flows. Debug Logs also get more accurate
• The first Flow API Version is here with mostly QoL updates.

For anyone who cares, we consider Flows a valid replacement for some Processes starting this release, with the caveat of more testing in Sandbox required compared to Processes. We still recommend wariness for enterprise orgs though, and do not consider it ready for prime-time in all contexts.

FIELD SERVICE

• Shift patterns solve a major pain point, and being able to mass create them is a big time saver and likely the first flow a consultant would have to build for dispatchers/territory managers. Combined with Shift Criteria this makes the entire concept a thoroughbred workhorse of a solution.
• Advanced recurrence is ‘Pretty big’ according to @lookasavage, but he ain’t saying why, so… IT’S BIG I TELL YOU.

DEVELOPMENT

• Salesforce Functions will shortly be open as Beta. You might remember them as Evergreen. Would I use this in prod, or even sandbox, yet ? Nah. Would I research it for fun ? HELL YASS.
• FIELDS(ALL) / FIELDS(CUSTOM) etc now exist (but have a lot of limitations). Are meant to replace describes, not to replace field selection in actual SOQL queries. Mostly because there’s a 200 record limit on SOQLs that use it.
• CI/CD starting to get easier, faster. Source Tracking between Local and SDB, and Org-dependent Unlocked Packages come expand your toolkit.
• Transaction Finalizers feature is in beta. Dev guide here. TL;DR you can know the status of a Queuable once it finishes without polling.
• Apex upgraded to 51.0 have some important behavioral changes to System and Schema functions, scroll to the bottom so you’re aware.
• Minor changes to Lead Conversion that require analysis as it can simplify stuff for a lot of orgs
• SOQL for loop syntax, for (Account acc : [SELECT ...), is now better optimized
• Platform Events can now be configured with a <user> and <batchSize> property.
• CMDT accessible via Static Methods, no need for SOQL anymore
  *SLDS gets a few more styling hooks and has breaking CSS changes
• ISVs, there’s new APEX Analytics for you and better Release and Error handling. You also get Free Platform Cache in a small amount. Now you too can experience this beautiful website
• Shield Subscribers, RTE Monitoring Setup now available via MDAPI

DOGELAND

• :doge: I think I’ll leave this in as long as it’s not fixed: STOP PUTTING PAID ADDONS IN CORE FEATURE RELEASE NOTES WITHOUT FLAGGING THEM AS SUCH THANK YOU.
• :doge: There was a bug in a function so we removed the function yo
• :doge: “Optimize” by adding LIGHTNING in places Users don’t care about

OTHER

• CPQ as usual has the best release notes format Check that out I can’t summarize it more than it is.
• Accounts can be Campaign Members because… you can contact Companies now ? I don’t really understand that one, like you’re calling a business that has no one in it ? Not a single contact or lead ?

Useless fact of the day: This ARN is 27% shorter than last release, and 48% shorter than Spring20.

---

This abridged version was graciously written up by the SF Discord

We have a nice wiki: https://wiki.sfxd.org/

And a linkedin page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sfxd/

Join the ~2500 members in the most active chat-based community around Salesforce these parts of the web at http://join.sfxd.org/

---

Winter '21 Abridged

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The Salesforce Discord Collective Presents:
THE WINTER 21 RELEASE NOTES - ABRIDGED
By reading these release notes, you forfeit your place to Dreamforce this year in favour of an SFXD member. Oh wait…

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CRITICAL STUFF

• Guest User Nerfed to hell, literally unplayable. May break Aura/LWC customizations.
• Email RefId Nuked, now uses Header. Retrocompatibility guaranteed, but if you abused RefId in the past with formulas and such, dis Bad News™.
• Dynamic Forms Now GA. It’s critical because mid-term it means Page Layouts gonna be retired. (As always, this is wild speculation but we’re often right).
• Flow Engine now API versioned. No more critical updates, better control. Yay. Probably Why most Updates are Postponed

GENERAL STUFF

• A rather discreet note highlights the creation of Customer 360 Guides and Solution Kits which contain context-driven architectural charts and designs considerations. Now THAT’s a great resource
• MFA getting easier which is a good thing for Enterprise software
• Recycle Bin Search Is Being Removed due to performance issues. Probably because it’s not stored in the same DB in the backend which isn’t optimized the same way as the other tables are
• Optimizer gets new Security Evaluation points, great what with all the changes happening lately
• Orders continue their pursuit of not sucking as much by now following the rest of the platform re:triggering automations on save. I still hate them though. So Feverishly
• Reps can now let email recipients choose from offered meeting times and it’s not limited to Lightning Scheduler woooo
• Salesforce now has an HTML Email Builder woooo
• Performance Review For LEX Pages =D
• Profile Management got a few updates that make Profile handling more secure.
• Perm Set Groups for PE, further solidifying that the full move to Perm Sets is happening at some point down the line

SALESFORCE CORE

• Submit For Approval button now supports conditional display options
• Kanban view shows you Changed Records, a nice QoL Improvement
• Salesforce now gives you Prebuilt Flows, Macros, and Quick Texts so Agents can be more productive
• Agents can now transfer Skill-based Omnichannel assigned items
• Fields can now be auto-added to existing Custom Report Types on creation (checkbox in the field creation wizard, defaults TRUE after activation). Good for lazy admins, less awesome for admins that do custom sections.
• Notifications support Page Reference Navigation I can’t wait for FRIDAY FRIDAY GOTTA GET DOWN ON FRIDAY

FLOWS

• Brand Name Screen Flows now redundant, Generics now on market
• Before Delete operation now available for Triggered Flows. Seems to be for related record updates more than anything. Does not replace APEX BeforeDelete Validations.
• OCD Users rejoice - no more 1 pixel weird lines with AutoLayout
• After a meditation session in the ancient caverns at the top of mount Workflow, the team decided to Allow evaluation only on specific changes, also on decision nodes. Sizable performance increase.
• All Flow Elements now support AND, OR, and other operators
• Various QoL Improvements with Record Traversing In Triggered Flows and Global variables without Formulas, as well as trigger type column in Flow Lists
• Yo I heard you like LWC so we put LWC in your LWC so you can LWC while you LWC LWC

/* This release got a few very anticipated updates for testing and reproduction. Enterprise users rejoice */

• Meet The Spy. You can now Impersonate Users while debugging in Sandbox.
• SF Maps team hired to work on Flow builder, releases Routing view on debug. Rated 0 stars on google play “Won’t direct me to bakery”.
• Flow Errors now send you to where the error is

For anyone who cares, we still don’t recommend replacing all your PBs with triggered Flows. We do recommend starting to look into how you will do this in the next releases though. It’s coming fast.

COMMUNITIES EXPERIENCE CLOUD

• Customize Communities with Code Settings for Embedded Chat and Channel Menu
• Better Page Management with custom page nesting and url edition
• Record Detail Based Audiences in what is low-key one of the best things to happen to communities. Fully dynamic audiences per records based on criteria. Holy crap.
• External Users can now switch Accounts and manage other users. Seems to be related to an old B2B commerce feature
• CSP settings enforced for inline scripts
• BYO Communities LWC pilot getting some nice updates - if you’re planning a BYO comm, probably wait until this is GA or request pilot before deploying an already deprecated Aura one

EINSTEIN

• T-800 joke goes here; something about an army ? Einstein Bots got easier to setup for newbs and give you MOAR POWER when automating stuff
• Predictions and Recommendations for you and for me and the entire human race.

DEVELOPMENT

• LWC now has a cache busting function when you wire data from Lightning Data Service adapters. Should be useful in replacing the refreshApex function which was a little confusing to use.
• SLDS CSS HOOKS. Hooks is not an acronym here.
• Lightning Scheduler now supports PE on events creation or changes, also provides interface to fetch external calendar availability.
• Embedded Chat now supports server-side code injection so you don’t modify your webpages uselessly.
• You can now Patch Salesforce. No, not that way.
• Scratch orgs pull a Ditto and now clone the Shape of an Org
• You can now nullify your nullpointerexception
• Platform Events now more reportable and now support APEX callouts anywhere within an existing transaction cycle by using Publish Immediately PEvt.
• Custom Notifications can be sent from APEX
• Apex now has runtime detection. This can be used to detect if something isFuture() / isQueueable() etc, it should scale much better. Combined with new sObject Error Methods this makes debugging better.

DOGELAND

• :doge: YOU CAN PUT IN-APP GUIDANCE ON EDIT AND NEW Annn… oh wait it’s part of mytrailhead, which is expensive, despite being listed as a lightning experience thing. Oh great. Actually since they made it energy-consuming to figure out what’s paid or not I deem the entire Lightning Experience Engagement section worthy of a Doge award.
• :doge: When Bypassing Security Fully becomes Standard Operating Procedure you probably should take a moment to wonder how we ended up here.
• :doge: Someone at the email team decided to up the size limit except the other providers won’t care, meaning you’ll probably get bounced emails… ???
• :doge: No one seems to know if Salesforce Anywhere is stable, or useful, or what it does. Not the best product launch I’ve seen, though the product itself seems ok I guess ?

OTHER

• :100: I don’t want to do a whole anti-doge section but this is how you communicate a feature pull. It’s precise, apologetic, to the point. Can’t be done better. Kudos.
• Translation Imports suck less now Someone went spelunking.
• Seriously Release Notes team can you stop putting ads in the release notes? It gets tiring. You have a marketing blog to be fake-happy about features.

---

This abridged version was graciously written up by the SF Discord

We have a nice wiki: https://wiki.sfxd.org/

And a linkedin page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sfxd/

Join the ~2500 members in the most active chat-based community around Salesforce these parts of the web at http://join.sfxd.org/

---

Summer '20 Abridged

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The Salesforce Discord Collective Presents:
THE SUMMER 20 RELEASE NOTES - ABRIDGED
Best read from 1.5m distance

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CRITICAL STUFF

• Lightning Sync will be retired in Winter 21. Recommended integration path: Einstein Activity Capture. This is the what, 5th release in a row they’ve nuked some integration with Google/Microsoft ? At this point I’d probably just recommend going third-party.
• Pardot Connector needs to be manually updated to v2.
• After Save Flows, Platform Event Flows, and Flows that Bypass User security change everything about Declarative Automation in Salesforce (but curb your enthusiasm a bit). Read our “Special Edition” at the end for more details, which also covers Dynamic Forms.
• Lightning Message Service (LMS) is now GA-ed and available. This replaces the janky pubsub module found with lwc-recipes and is now the official communication mechanism between VF pages, Aura, LWCs, and components placed in the lightning utility bar. See /u/temp_sv_dev 's github repo here for some samples on how to swap out pubsub.
• Some Permissions Changed and Need Review

GENERAL STUFF

• Paths now create Kanban views and are also subject to confetti which I assume means they’ve merged Kanban and Path in the backend
• Email Insights just got a little bit smarter. Requires Einstein Activity Capture.
• B2B Commerce Orders protested against confinement and aren’t forcibly tied to Products anymore. It’s worth a shout because a lot of companies did custom Order__c due to this limitation. Only applies to B2B Commerce, my bad.
  
• The Related Record component in the App Builder now allows showing the parent of a parent AND polymorphic relationships, which is actually super nice
• Knowledge took the red pill and now sees record access as it really is (Beta)
• Dynamic Actions don’t force you to open the Page Layout to changes Actions in Lightning (for desktop)
• Salesforce Help Login now goes through trailblazer420.yolo which is OK for most people but annoying for implementation partners which have tons of the same user with the same email.
• Mobile App team get the “Best Release Notes” award because I can’t summarize them more than they did. Seriously, great job. Also Custom Notifications get a nice upgrade.

FLOWS

• The Critical stuff we wrote above
• Flow now try to help you do Flows that suck less with in-app prompts when you do things that suck
• Debug Mode is now really a Debug Mode meaning data isn’t saved when you run the debug thank god finally pfiew
• Passing Data to Flows now easier
• Developers rejoice as Apex-defined Variables can now be returned, and Flows now accuerately indicate usage in debug logs

COMMUNITIES

• Standard Actions Overrides!
• A few personalization updates with multi-level nav bar and some standard component changes.
• Sharing data with external users now simpler thanks to External Account Hierarchies
• Salesforce have Fixed a bug for the Service Appoinment Component which requires some manual setup.
• Other notes were either Previously announced (no more Guest user owners, etc) or Pilot (LWC Build-your-Own)

SERVICE

• Salesforce are releasing their own CTI which seems to be a front for Amazon Connect and some SF polish like automated transcription. Comes at extra cost, unsure if worth it ATM.
• Bots get Multi-Language Support, Best-Practice Help Pages, Skill-Based Routing to Agents, and Builder upgrades.
• Routing now allows optional skills which avoids huge queue times.
• Surveys are still not as good as GetFeedback but are slowly getting there. It’s kind of peppered accross the entire Release Notes though

REPORTS AND DASHBOARDS

• Flow Interviews now also available for reporting
• PriceBookEntries now targetable when creating Custom Report Types
• This was already the case for Formatted Data, but now CSV can now also be attached to subscriptions

EINSTEIN

• I may have missed this before but it seems that Salesforce have now decided to cover themselves re: the use of the Einstein name: "Rights of ALBERT EINSTEIN are used with permission of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Represented exclusively by Greenlight." which I find funny
• Einstein features have gotten a lot of love in the last year, and are getting at a point where I could start recommending clients buy them.
• Prediction Builder now supports Field-to-Field Comparisions
• Case-WrapUp is a nice addition to Service Einstein
• Einstein Search now gets Natural Language Processing and is no longer limited by Shield Encryption

DEVELOPMENT

• Unlocked Packages will require Code Coverage to Promote and can also be Org-Dependent
• Einstein OCR via API
• Sending VF Emails to Guest Users requires extra parameter, check if you’re subject to this.
• Reusable CSS betweens LWCs. I think design tokens are still a bit wonky though.
• Use the @salesforce/community scoped module to import information about the current community context
• Connect REST Api now returns SVG instead of Flash
• Generic SObject data types are here and can be used in Flow actions. This means you can use sObject and sObject[] in your flow screen LWCs!
• Private Connect sets up a fully managed network connection between your Salesforce org and your AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
• Crypto now supports RSA-SHA384 and RSA-SHA512.
• TOTP via APEX now possibilities
• CDC Events now support mandatory sent fields in events
• Dev and Dev Pro Sandbox now support scratch org type of source tracking. Hopefully they will support at least partial sandboxes in the future!
• System.Security.stripInaccessible() now respect relationship fields. It’s now minimal overhead to add FLS / CRUD checker to your apex. Finally.
• New @JSON annotationcontrols whether instances of the class can be serialized or deserialized. Default setting in API v48+ more restrictive than current situation.

DOGELAND

• :doge: Someone at SF thought it was a good idea to re-open the Work.com casket but put a Sales pitch instead of content, and brand it as COVID relief. Reception mixed at best.
• :doge: Salesforce PRESENTS: OPTIMIZER ! Yes it’s the same (awesome) tool that was first an external website and then a menu item. No, we don’t know why it’s in the release notes. Again. And Again. And Again.
• :doge: In-App Guidance got an upgrade with Walkthroughs buuuuuuuuut you need MyTrailhead to use it. Too bad because it looks Dope as Hell
• CMT team wins “weirdest Jargon” award for an otherwise cool release note

---

This abridged version was graciously written up by the SF Discord

We have a nice wiki: https://wiki.sfxd.org/

And a linkedin page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sfxd/

Join the ~2000 members in the most active chat-based community around Salesforce these parts of the web at http://join.sfxd.org/

---

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SPECIAL EDITION - FUTURE OF AUTOMATION

I put this outside of the ARN themselves because, well, it’s not a release note.

Re: After/Before/Events Triggered Flows:

• HUGE SPECULLATION as alway - I’m calling Process Builder deprecated by 1y and fully retired by 2y. To the angry people that flamed me when I called Aura deprecated: BOOYAH.
• Using PB is still required due to current Flow limitations, and I expect that there will be a tool to migrate one to the other seeing as technically they’re both the exact same tool in the backend - so don’t panic about your Process Builders just yet.
• These changes add yet another automation source to Objects. That new automation source probably won’t play super well with others, as the Before Save flows highlighted with APEX.
• The new Flow execution contexts don’t support everything that is in PB or even normal Flows yet (no Subflows, no ISCHANGED()).
• In Summary while these are very exciting times and highlight a bright future of Low-Code possibilities, we currently advise NOT to use these new flows outside of Prototyping or Sandboxes.

Re: User-Permission Bypassing Flows:

• While SF seems to push Flows as Admin-friendly, the reality is that as time goes on, Flows are becoming more of Procedural programming with a GUI than anything else.
• The above effectively puts the skill floor higher for any new admins - think 7 years ago when all you had was page layouts and workflows. Things are a bit more complex now.
• User-Permission Bypassing means you can effectively do VERY BAD THINGS, and to be honest I would rather they hide this option behind a few layers of prompts asking if you know WTF you’re doing. As-is I can totally see compliance issues in the medium-term. I encourage any Auditors or Consulting partners to add checking for this permission in any audit checklist and ensure that it’s needed.
• For all SF Admins reading this, SFXD already told you this last release, but really: Train yourself on Flows, Fast. You’re going to need it.

Re: Dynamic Forms:

• Dynamic Forms will extend quite a lot what can be done in Lightning Page Layouts. It pretty much replaces Layouts in general.
• The current status is Preview, meaning SF don’t want to support it just yet. If you’re using it in Production, this is bad. Don’t do it. Wait a few releases more.
• I am still unsure what this means for Page Layouts/Record Types in the future. Probably will be decorrelated and based on conditional display (which doesn’t work well ATM)
• As-Is this is a very strong Do Not Use.
• It seems that more and more things are getting Builders in the backend which allow more powerful stuff in the hands of admins (Flows, Bots, Paths). While this does sound like great news, it’ll raise the skill floor to be a competent Salesforce Manager in the next years

Re: Lightning Message Service (LMS) and continued support of legacy code:

• With LMS there is now one ring to rule them all. In its most ideal usage, this now serves as the primary inter-component communication mechanism between LWCs that are in separate component trees.
• But, until your org(s) reach the state where you can invest 100% in LWCs only (because you are moving to that future, right?) this is now a quick win for bringing your VF and Aura solutions to play nicely with your shiny new LWCs.
• Now that they have finally settled on conventions (LMS using various channels), I fully expect this to be the backbone for some cool event driven application hooks in the future.

Spring '20 Abridged

---

The Salesforce Discord Collective Presents:
THE SPRING 20 RELEASE NOTES - ABRIDGED
Bug Fixes & Various Impro… wait this isn’t the app changelog.

---

CRITICAL STUFF

• Lex is getting activated for all orgs on January 7, 2020. No, this does not mean all users will be forced to use LEX. Yes, this means you need to study impact. No, it shouldn’t be high impact unless you follow no best practices whatsoever, which we’ve already covered a few times.
• New Mobile App incoming for all in Spring 20 so read up on how to personalize it and fast. Also SF nuking their mobile browser version so better learn to love that new app.
• SameSite Cookie Changes may require action to prevent integrations failing
• Muting Permission Sets now live within Permission Set Groups which are also GA. While this is awesome for some cases, it adds another layer of stuff to audit, and another layer of complexity to permission handling.
• Custom Setting access and Custom Metadata Access now handled via Profiles & Perm Sets by default.

GENERAL STUFF

• In-App Guidance can now be set by profile and CAN BE TRANSLATED. There’s few other minor updates but in general these updates make the feature something that could actually be used for user onboarding in bigger orgs now.
• You can now clone Opportunities and Campaigns with related records. This change is wayyyyyyyyy more hype than it sounds like because this actually required a Flow at the least before.
• The App Launcher no longer requires you to gaze upon it in raptuous glee to change apps, and now has a search bar. Small QoL change but one that has high positive impact for users changing apps all the time.
• Allow your users to use the Salesforce new Voice Assistant, powered by admin-defined Skills. “YES EINSTEIN PLEASE LOG NEW OPPORTUNTITY “TOP SECRET CLIENT” FOR $1M - excuse me sir I’m getting off at this stop, horribly busy day isn’t it - CALL BACK TOMORROW TO BE FIRST ON DEAL”
• Data Mask allows securing sandbox data easily. Great for avoiding undue emails.
• Einstein Opportunity Scoring for Everyone but you’ll need 400 closed opportunities in the past 6 months, half of which should be closed won to take advantage of it.
• Tasks can be assigned to Queues in what is a gigantic moment of happiness for most Sales admins. What isn’t written is how it handles Reminders linked to those tasks, testing needed.
• Outlook integration and Lightning Sync change authentication/integration possibilities - check if you’re now eligible. Both are also up for “Worst Title” in the original release notes.

FLOWS, PROCESSES

Stephen King reported crying in a corner as flow team continues to be KILLIN’ IT for the second release in a row.
As an aside we recommend subscribing to the Flow Product Owner’s blog ( rss ) for insane stuff that may not be ready for full release.

• In one release, we now have Flows that can run in System mode, Triggered Flows that run BEFORE UPDATE and Object-Agnostic Flow Invocable Actions.

Breaking the List format for a second here, because those changes are massive. First, this means Process Builder are less relevant in a lot of cases, as they run after a DML. Here, before stuff touches the database, Flows can run and edit values on the record. This is FAST AS FUCK and plays well with limits. Combined with Scheduled Flows, this means that you can remove quite a few processes that had long-runing paused interviews (replace that PB that says “set contract to expired after end date in the past” with a scheduled Flow that will run daily). In short - if you’re an admin, you know Process Builder, but you don’t know Flows, go to trailhead NOW or ask for training ASAP because your job will depend on it medium-term.

• A formerly hidden feature is now fully documented and easily available - getting fields from Parent objects via formulas after a GET element, without further queries
• Following the Contact Roles becoming more like normal objects last release, you can now trigger Process, Flows and WF Builder off of them.

COMMUNITIES

• Account Hierarchies via Parent Accounts can be used for record sharing (Beta) so you can see child account information if you own a Parent.
• Salesforce CMS can now post to other systems - including heroku, completely custom endpoints, etc. I imagine this means you could technically use Salesforce CMS to federate content from even external sites and allow Marketing to handle it all in Salesforce, but the Help page is decidedly not forthcoming. I would tag this as “keep an eye on it, see what SF hatches”. Probably not fully baked, hence why they’re not putting it in the spotlight.
• Report Builder now GA as is Report Viewing. However “You can give permission to create and edit reports to all role-based external users with licenses such as Customer Community Plus and Partner Community. You can also give permission to all legacy role-based portal licenses such as Customer Portal and Gold Partner.” So in short no license requirements change.
• Playground App on iOS and Android to test how communities look like in mobile app

EMAILS

• UTF8 EMAIL ADRESSES FINALLY WOOOOOOOOOOO THANK YOU EMAIL TEAM
• You can send Emails from a list and now they support drafts
• Enhanced Email Relays now active for everyone which makes sending emails that won’t bounce that much easier

SERVICE

• Dynamic Knowledge Article Recommendations powered by Einstein
• Bots get way more awesome with conditional messaging and better error handling when asking for information and Whatsapp support. Also bots don’t wait as long when your users go out to buy cigarettes and swear they’ll come back.
• Bulk Macros in LEX

SMALL RANDOM THINGS THAT ARE NICE

• Advanced Currency Management is now in LEX but still has all of its limitations which makes using it a pain.
• You can filter products when adding them to Opportunities

DEVELOPMENT

• @track no longer required for LWC which will make unupdated code samples and documentation confusing for new comers, but is otherwise a nice change
• Wire Adapters Not Guaranteed to Emit the Same Data and we’re all confused as to how exactly the data could be different to be honest.
• Calendars, Communities now available and customizable vi API
• That pre-fill records via URL thing from above is also usable via dev
• Embedded Services for Web (AKA Snapins, AKA LiveAgentButtonsV2) now support LWC embeds
• Communities search parameter changed to :term - legacy parameter :searchString deprecated but supported.
• You get an API Call.YOU GET AN API CALL. EVERYONE GETS API CALLS

CPQ - by Mekel

• Do More with Improved Price Rules in the Configurator – Price Rules just got a small upgrade, price rules utilizing config attribute values will have their updates/pricing changes reflected directly in the Configurator, no more running back and forth to the QLE to see the updates
• Apply Edit Rules Efficiently in the Configurator – YO we got a new Quick Action called Apply Rules that runs ALL (Configurator) Price and Product rules, so you don’t have to constantly run your rules with every change.
• Logic Updated for Percent Values in Price Action Formulas – No more madness of worrying about how the value needs to be input or output for percentage fields. This will potentially affect your existing price rules and throw of your calculations, make sure you’re covered.
• Transition from Managed Package Licenses to Permission Set Licenses – Salesforce is releasing a tool to help you determine where you are in converting from managed package licenses to permission set licenses. But you still get to do the grunt work of converting them 😉

EINSTEIN ANALYTICS - by Supergrape

• Easily find where your data is being used/comes from with Data Catalog.
• Row limit expanded to 10 billion from 1 billion for Analytics Plus licenses.
• A slew of new connectors added to plug in your other CRMs!
• Do you have a gigantic… Opportunity object? Does the Data Flow take so long to run that you can’t run it every 15 minutes? Well now you can split your Opportunity (and any other object) into it’s own scheduled sync to let your Dataflow run faster! Also upped the limit from 30 dataflows to 100.
• Inheriting security from Salesforce got a little better, still kind of bad though.
• You can now use SOQL to query Salesforce Data directly, no dataset required!
• Built in “Data Blending”, come on Salesforce, it’s called a join. Everyone knows it’s a join, why cause naming confusions. Nice that they’re trying to limit the need for SAQL though.
• Record Actions now have the Lightning theme and can trigger a Flow or Lightning Action.
• Native GUI support for modifying the XMD on datasets is getting much better. It’s almost as good as the old Heroku tool that already did all of this.
• I’ve pretty much always worked EA in Prod, looks like they may be supporting that idea now by allowing you to work on a new version of a dashboard then Publish it when it’s ready.

Field Service Lightning

• Shifts for FSL (beta) allow you to create flexible working hours which was previously a major headache for any company that didn't have a weekly recurring schedule (read: LIKE EVERY COMPANY)
  • Can be used in conjunction with Operating Hours
  • Basically looks like you can assign people to one-off shifts rather than being forced to implement recurring shifts that can only recur per day-of-the-week.Alternative till now is a ton of temp records and teaching admins how to data load square pegs in a circle hole. Requires more analysis and more than 1 screenshot to see full capability and whether it can fully replace Op Hours, though.
  • comes with a fancy lightning component to see and manage people's assigned shifts.
• Maintenance Plans now post in chatter to let you know before the VP of Operations that the last-minute PB you slipped in at 2am last night caused 3000 work orders to fail on creation
• Field Service Mobile
  • Global actions are now available from TOP LEVEL screens, which is HUGE. IT IS SAD HOW HUGE THIS IS. Right in line with opening up mobile app customization to developers. "YOU'RE WELCOME" - Salesforce, probably
  • As opposed to being a total black box, you can now manually sync your app for offline use on-demand. Great QoL improvement especially for testing.

BLAST FROM THE PAST

• Case Merge now GA and you can hide closed statuses in the picklist in lex now…
• Prefill Record Values on Create from button. Probably linked to this and then they left the API open, in henry’s immortal words.

DOGELAND

• Not technically a Release Note but I would like to give a special :doge: award to whomever thought hiding interesting stuff under the “Lightning Scheduler” section with no title was a good idea. Seriously
• :doge:“Yo Mark what language do they speak in Fr…” “ENGLISH” “…ance?” “ENGLISH I TELL YOU” “… and Japan?” “…”
• :doge:yo this new feature we released relies on deprecated shit. Please click our checkbox to say “yeah I wanna use deprecated shit” to continue using our new feature.
• :doge:The LEX converter is now external to SF and looks like a full-fledged app. No idea why the release notes just mention its home page. In the meantime it’s a link, outside of your org, that looks like Salesforce, and helps you migrate your org. Maybee next time they can do a mobile app that iframes a screenshot of a Salesforce Org hosted ona heroku app that forwards to a local client or something less confusing IDK.
• :doge:Hey if you want new features on your cloud-only and client-agnostic enterprise-class software you can now install a chome extension because tying people into a browser made by an ad giant and not available on all platforms was obviously the best choice.
• Also up for a Doge Award is the Object Creator heroku tool, which is still completely and hopelessly broken.

---

This abridged version was graciously written up by the SF Discord

We have a nice wiki: https://wiki.sfxd.org/

And a linkedin page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sfxd/

Join the ~1900 members in the most active chat-based community around Salesforce these parts of the web at http://join.sfxd.org/

Winter '20 Abridged

---

The Salesforce Discord Collective Presents:
THE WINTER 20 RELEASE NOTES - ABRIDGED
Can we speak about the fact that “winter” releases come out when it’s still 35°C like seriously the logo has palm trees

---

Welcome to the hospice

• Original Territory Management Is Being Retired
• Customizable forecasting soon to be retired as well
• Data.com Prospector and Data.com Clean Are Being Retired

Awesome stuff

• The new mobile app is kickass and customizable
• INTERNATIONAL EMAIL CHARS THANK DOG IT’S HERE
• Event Monitoring available with SHIELD. Get notified when people pull reports just after getting fired! Read setup instructions carefully though, unsubscribe from event channels while Salesforce upgrades your org to the Winter ‘20release, then resubscribe.
• Custom In-App guidance is GA, to help your users not feel lost in the sea of white that is LEX
• Everything about Flows this release. Seriously, read below.
• Reports get Row-level formulas, Field to field comparisions, and unique value counts. Everything you ever wanted.

Awesome stuff if it was still 2014

• The recycle bin. IT’S IN LEX. YES, AFTER FOUR YEARS. CELEBRATE
• Printable list views also make a comeback in LEX

Flows and PBs

If these guys continue delivering at this rate I’m going to have to do two release notes, one for that team, and one for all the others…

• SCHEDULED FLOWS you can uninstall Mass Action Flow Scheduler now
• CONDITIONAL DISPLAYS IN SCREENS
• New components in Flows: Lookups! Actual darn lookups, Notifications like PB, hell you can even use LWC in Flows now
• QoL updates: variables are easier to setup, activation directly in the editor as well as click-and-drag to select, and specific code coveage when deployed as active
• You can now subscribe to FlowDefinition Errors via Process Buidler, ensuring you always know if something doesn’t work
• Flows are now subject to Profile Controls per Flow

Put some varnish on it - old things that just got better in no particular order

• Mass actions on list search
• Search keeps catching up to google in the fabled 1990s search engine race. Salesforce also premiers its new pricing model of "pay for more users even if you have the right license to get this" with its new search personalization
• Account Teams and Opportunity Contact Roles now behave like normal objects and can be customized and automated off of
• Opportunity products get minor QoL updates that make a huge difference, with default quantities, quantities being hideable on the PL, and the addition page supporting dependent piclists
• Acitivties get a another coat of paint — by Spring23 it’ll look like a geisha — with less archival annoyances, easier completion and infinite scroll. Einstein can also sync repeating events in what is a contender for “Best ‘Duh’ update”.

Service

• You can find people to email from Cases more easily, the email templates suck less, and your users can even have signatures without workarounds now
• Omnichannel: a few new objects, the ability to say “YO OMNI, GET THIS CASE TO THIS PERSON NOW”, skill-based-routing declarative setup now GA, SECONDARY PRIORITY WOOOOOOOOO Finally you can escalate in queues and estimated waiting times for your clients. Omnichannel! Now also available in Sales with Digital Engagement. Is Omnichannel right for you ? Ask your AE Today !
• Chatter unread so your Agents can stop saying Chatter’s cluttered

Communities

• Remember that CMS we talked about last release notes ? It’s GA now and we still don’t know how to feel about it.
• Navigation Menus Variations now exist. Future updates will probably allow it to be dynamic per page but for now it’s meh.
• Case-specific components and pages dont exist anymore (but existing ones won’t get deleted), use generic record components instead
• Sharing Setting to set Guest access to private for all the things and guest users also won’t see all users, and also they don’t own records created anymore yay security.
• So as an obvious corrolary now you have Sharing settings for Guest Users so you can use sharing rules
• Partners and customer community users can send emails, no way that’ll ever be abused

Einstein Analytics

• A ton of new templates, Retail Banking, Wealth Management, Insurance, Manufacturing, and Health.
• Tables are finally catching up to Excel, kind of… Ability to show Sub AND Grand Totals in a table without hacking things together in SAQL.
• Number formatting in the GUI so you don’t have to futz with XMD anymore (yay almost Excel)! Still upset they took down https://wave-labs.herokuapp.com/ though.
• They said Wave 1.0 (Classic Designer) was retired in the last release. I guess you have another shot at watching the conversion tool fail.
• Introducing 15, 20, and 30 minute Dataflow Syncing and increasing the number of daily Dataflow runs to 120 instead of 60.
• Changing the name of a Step to a Query. Totally worth the time. Who wants to bet they didn’t change them in the dashboard JSON though?
• Automatic Dashboard, Dataflow, and Lens snapshots just in case you screw something up. Too bad they dropped the ball and make you access them through the REST API instead of any number of easier ways. I’m assuming we’ll see a GUI for this in spring.
• Users can finally get emails of Dashboards/Widgets by subscribing to them! Now your executives can have information delivered directly to them rather than asking you to pull it for them. They’re going to make you do it anyway but hey Salesforce made an attempt.
• Analytics in the mobile App! There are two pages about this in the release notes but no screenshots. There is however a broken link to sign up for a beta version of the app! Non-broken link here.

Others

• “Where is this used” now GA

Dev

• Public Methods Access only from same package in LEX components may affect your existing setup
• LWC in Flows, Flows in LWC
• Lightning Message Channel (Developer Preview) to communicate across the DOM, between Aura components, Visualforce pages, and Lightning web component
• Callouts Are Excluded from Long-Running Request Limit
• Share css across components
• Custom tabs for LWC
• FLS enforcing in APEX out of Pilot, now Beta
• Packaging: Second-Generation Managed Packaging Generally Available
• CDC events now includes list of fields changed
• BULK API nowuspports queries
• Formulas recalculation in APEX. that is HUGE — you can calculate formulas without a dml, in batch. let that sink in… you can basically have formulas lift heavy calculations and do it in an apex class without saving

Things are just horrible

• Yeah that Object Creator tool we talked about two releases ago ? They released it silently, and it’s completely broken. Can’t be used for anything. It mistakes rows for columns, doesn’t parse types correctly, can’t add more than 10 fields to the page layout. It is more of a disappointment than I was to my Ballet teacher.
• Hey if you modify page layouts on custom objects now, you can go get yourself a coffee, cause you ain’t seeing that for 15 minutes

---

This abridged version was graciously written up by the SF Discord http://join.sfxd.org/
We have a wiki as well now: https://wiki.sfxd.org/

Summer '19 Abridged

The Salesforce Discord Collective Presents:
THE SUMMER 19 RELEASE NOTES - ABRIDGED
We don’t use cookies to track you, but we like chocolate ones

As said last time, we stopped separating LEX into a different section.

CRITICAL STUFF

OOOH, SHINY!

GENERAL STUFF

EMAILS

SERVICE CLOUD

PROCESSES, FLOWS, ETC

COMMUNITIES

REPORTING

ANALYTICS

DEV

LAUGHING, CRYING, WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE

This abridged version was graciously written up by the SF Discord https://discord.gg/8J5mvX7
We have a “website” now: https://sfxd.github.io/

Spring '19 Abridged

The Salesforce Discord Collective Presents:
THE SPRING 19 RELEASE NOTES - ABRIDGED
As Exciting as the new Samsung WV9900 release

CRITICAL STUFF

GDPR RELATED

If GDPR is important to you, you should read the entire "Email Experience" section.

TL;DR:

GENERAL STUFF

FLOWS AND PROCESSES

SALES CLOUD

SERVICE CLOUD

MARKETING

COMMUNITIES

Tons of small quality of life updates.
Like literal tons.

If you’re a big communities user you should read the appropriate section

LIGHTNING

CPQ

If you use Avalara for Salesforce Billing, do not upgrade to Salesforce Billing Spring ’19 without following these instructions .

EINSTEIN ANALYTICS

DEV

BUGFIXES

LIGHTS ARE ON BUT NOBODY’S HOME

DIDN’T QUITE MAKE THE CUT

Addendum: I think this is the last time I split LEX into a different category.
Most features now are LEX-only and LEX will be activated for everyone in one year anyway.

This abridged version was graciously written up by the SF Discord https://discord.gg/JG4Bc4q
We have a website where we host best practices and other resources: https://sfxd.github.io

And we're also present on LinkedIn, where we post these release notes: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sfxd/

Winter '19 Abridged

The Salesforce Discord Collective Presents:
THE WINTER 19 RELEASE NOTES - ABRIDGED
May contain nuts

CRITICAL STUFF

THANK GOD

LIMITS

GENERAL STUFF

SALES CLOUD

SERVICE CLOUD

MARKETING

COMMUNITIES

LIGHTNING

DEV

ANALYTICS

OTHER STUFF

You can warn users they’re leaving salesforce, opt-out of My domain without an instance attached, toggle stricter CSP instead of just activating it, and I guess this is nice enough…? to finish on.

This abridged version was graciously written up by the SF Discord https://discord.gg/JG4Bc4q
We have a “website” now: https://sfxd.github.io/ with our beautiful new logo thanks to Aki we love you man ♡

Summer '18 Abridged

The Salesforce Discord Collective Presents:
THE SUMMER 18 RELEASE NOTES - ABRIDGED
Featuring Jokes, Sarcasm, and actual cool features

---

CRITICAL STUFF

• THEY ADDED A CASE/SWITCH STATEMENT TO APEX. All developers in the world cry in joy. Angels rain down from the sky.
• If you have LEX enabled but are not using it, you might want to review your "Set Up Users" tab if you don't want your users to be switched to LEX automatically once a week. No I'm not kidding.
• New URL format is live.
• Shield Data at Rest encryption available for more stuff, including emails and FSL workorders and workorderlineitems.
• Community: Update Your <h1> Tag Overrides to <h3> for Topic Detail and Search Results Article Title, and Update Your Overrides for Some Lightning Community Components
• Flows: Enable Flow and Process Queries to Execute in Batches (Critical Update)
• Retirements: Files Sync, Chatter Desktop,

GENERAL STUFF

• You now see field dependencies on the record edit page.
• Salesforce Essentials gets Process Builder and Flows
• Paths support dependent picklists now =D
• If you have Enterprise or Performance, you can run Duplicate Jobs on custom objects. Hopefull yOpportunities are coming soon(tm).
• There's a Lightning Knowledge migration tool now. It's in Beta. If you're using the old knowledge, keep using that for now.
• Einstein analytics gets connectors for SAP Hana and Windows Azure SQL Warehouse. Also max number of replicated objects upped from 50 to 100.
• You can rename your SF domain :) That said, My Domain URLs change in Sandbox (Critical Update), you might want to check that out.

FLOWS AND PROCESSES

For once these deserve their own section

• QUERIES WILL BE BULKIFIED. WOOT.
• Flows now have a GUI debugger where you can set variables and stuff.
• Process builders now give nice errors! This makes them slightly less unbearable to use at large scale.
• Record Create and Record Update actions no longer fire with the ALL-OR-NONE header. This means that only the records that couldn't be created/updated will fail now, instead of all records in the DML.
• Working with Collection Variables now suck less, with new operators like COUNT, Remove Common, Remove before First, Add at Start. Fewer shit loops just to count collections!
• Same link as above: if you're not using Stages yet, you should look into them.
• impl guide allow dynamic launching of Flows based on channels & records and stuff. Combined with Stages, this looks COOL. AS. FUCK. Here's the impl guide..
• You can use Lightning Components as Flow Actions (GA)

LIGHTNING

• You can modify PersonAccount page layouts and stuff in LEX.
• You can drag and drop calendar elements in LEX to update them now. How very 1999.
• List view filters in LEX suck less
• Lightning Report Builder now GA ooooooh yeah.
• Joined reports in LEX (beta, needs admin setup)
• New Run page (beta, needs admin setup)

SALES CLOUD

• For our Contacts to Multiple Accounts lovers, Lead conversion has been improved.. Also somewhat improves opportunity creation on conversion.
• Schedules now available in LEX. No limitations apply, for once.

SERVICE CLOUD

• Salesforce now has automated answering for Live Agent. Called Einstein Bots, they are available through LEX setup only (but work server-side, so you can switch back to classic afterwards) and seem to require use of Snap-Ins chat instead of standard LA buttons. More info needed. Help page should be here after summer18 comes out.
• You can Set Default Email Field Values with Apex in Lightning Experience. Their title is clear enough :)
• Omnichannel Skill-based routing is GA. Still can't route chats or SOS with skills-based routing though.
• Snap-in chats get new features, and seems to be the future of LiveAgent to some extent.

MARKETING

• You can create HTML templates in LEX. These HTML templates can be edited by users. Life is sweet and documented.
• You can send Emails to a Campaign from LEX via a button. Why you would do this rather than use an email cannon like Mailchimp or a real solution like Marketing Cloud is beyond me.

COMMUNITIES

• If you use FSL and Snap-in chat, your customers can now book an appointment with you. Nice.
• you can now Update, add, delete, and track library members all from one place. This feature is available in Lightning communities, accessed through Lightning Experience. Also modifiable via Files home.

DEV

• As said above, Case/Switch ! wooo.
• COUNT() no longer a huge waste of resources
• Apex usage limit increased
• New ENUMS Auth.VerificationMethod and System.TriggerOperation
• You can refresh a LEX tab through new JS api calls
• Lightning Component Library Is Generally Available - https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/component-library
• Apply Lightning Experience Stylesheets to Visualforce Pages (Generally Available)
• $CustomMetadata Global Variable
• Second Generation Packaging is coming

WE'RE ALL VERY IMPRESSED

• They added Topics for Objects to LEX. We're all very impressed, esp without support for reporting or list views.
• You can use Sharing Sets with all community licenses now. Not like that was a blocking feature requested 3 years ago already.
• They added Paths to two more objects. Code's so spaghetti this requires celebration.
• A new GDPR help page for your marketing team to read.
• Trigger Custom Application Logic When Users Log Out (Beta). Finally you can force all Oauth sessions to close. And delete all of Karen's data after she logs out. You know why, Karen.

Addendums due to changes before release:

GENERAL STUFF

• You can Override the New Event Button on the Calendar in Lightning Experience. Only overrides with a Lightning component to customize the action. Action must contain ONLY standard fields. Only replaces the button, not the actual action, so other places where the action is shown uses the standard one.
• Custom Buttons Used as Actions on Page Layouts Can No Longer Be Deleted Prevents corruption. Generally happens when you had a button, you put it in LEX, then you deleted the button and didn't realize that the page layout still referenced it.
• Scanned PDF Previews in Files can now be set to display either as SVG (standard) or JPG.
• For anyone who has the EinsteinBuilderFree license, Einstein Prediction Builder allows you to try your hand at AI without coding.
  
  You can test it by signing up here
• RSSBot spoiled this one for Discord Users but Convert JavaScript Buttons to Lightning-Friendly Alternatives With the Lightning Experience Configuration Converter
• All Groups and PE Orgs created after Summer 18 are LEX Only and will require SF support to activate Classic
• Einstein Activity Capture free with Sales Cloud

PARDOT

• - Permanently Delete Prospects has been activated for all orgs, instead of going to the recycle bin.

---

This abridged version was graciously written up by the SF Discord https://discord.gg/JG4Bc4q
We have a "website" now: https://SFXD.github.io/ it doesn't contain much more than a link to Discord but we're proud.

Spring '18 Abridged

The Salesforce Discord Collective Presents:
THE SPRING 18 RELEASE NOTES - ABRIDGED
Featuring Jokes, Sarcasm, and actual cool features

GDPR THINGS

CRITICAL STUFF

GENERAL STUFF

LIGHTNING

CONSOLE

SALES CLOUD

SERVICE CLOUD

MARKETING

COMMUNITIES

DEV

This abridged version was graciously written up by the SF Discord https://discord.gg/6eQFVUv

WINTER 18 RELEASE NOTES

WINTER 18 RELEASE NOTES

CRITICAL STUFF

GENERAL SALESFORCE THINGS

SALES

SERVICE

A. LEX

Current general status: to study. Updates are starting to make LEX somewhat service compatible. still very bleeding edge though.

B. CLASSIC

COMMUNITIES

DEV

This abridged version was graciously reposted from the SF Discord https://discord.gg/6eQFVUv

Summer 17 Release Cliff Notes - The Ancestor to the ARN

Windyo — 05/08/2017 1:33 PM
Man i am liking the summer 17 release notes
😃
Windyo — 05/08/2017 2:18 PM
I just did a small cliff notes post so here you go gents
Salesforce just put a full-fledged readiness check, workaround-proposing migration Wizard
Lightning Console now has a Split view (multiple full records on one page) and supports multibrowser.
personAccounts and Omnichannel (beta) supported in LEX console.
You can now use your Classic Text, Custom HTML, and Letterhead email templates in Lightning Experience. What they don't tell you is the SHITLOAD OF RESTRICTIONS : overwrites signatures, can't edit attachments, and the Email editors need the TemplateId field added via the Lightning App Builder.
Lightning Knowledge is now in GE, but is not a complete product, so unless you have a single-language simple Knowledge, avoid it at all costs

duplicate management is now more awesome with cross-object results and default ules that handle leads-to-accounts detection for example

Search is now more awesome, with the possible addition of external sources of results, including but not limited to Confluence and Google Drive

Lightning Sync for Google: Two-Way Sync, General Availability. Google in your Salesforce, Google in your Salefsorce - Third party integrations which do not offer added value will become redundant soon. Sell your stock options while they last
Salesforce For Outlook is going to be deprecated in future releases. SF advise migration to  Lightning for Outlook and Lightning Sync

Social Customer Service now available in PE

A new community is out, Partner 360, which is awesome and focuesses on partners.
you can use Adobe Experience Manager (a CMS) to change how your community looks. Probably more compatible CMS to come in future releases.
you can now embed the Salesforce COmmunity login page in a website. not sure how they're securing that, but hey, it's cool.
COMMUNITIES CAN BE MIGRATED WITH CHANGESETS HOLY SHIT
Koa and Kokua are dead.
Case Community pages are being nerfed HARD. https://releasenotes.docs.salesforce.com/en-us/summer17/release-notes/rn_networks_case_component_retirement.htm

you can now convert Attachments to files.
Attachments confirmed to be Deprecated, will be phased out.

Flows can now be embedded in Lightning pages - will need to test if we can exploit this for awesomess.
Spicy Waffle Berserker — 05/08/2017 4:21 PM
interesting
Said it before, but LEX runs way faster in my gs0 org
as that other person said - can't remember who
there's some interesting dev stuff too, but I haven't looked at it in detail yet
biggest thing for me is probably native metadata retrieval and deployment
vips — 05/08/2017 4:30 PM
anything interesting on the apex sidE?
Windyo — 05/08/2017 5:02 PM
Can't say, not a dev so what I find cool could be useless and vice versa.
vips — 05/08/2017 5:03 PM
yeah, they added some stuff, but nothing special, and nothing that really advanced the lang
vips — 05/08/2017 5:13 PM
I wish they would just implement generics.

Spring '25 Abridged

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The Salesforce Discord Collective Presents:
THE SPRING 25 RELEASE NOTES - ABRIDGED
I can’t believe it’s not AI

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CRITICAL STUFF

• Permissions Change. New View All Fields per Object allows overriding FLS for a Permission Set (a RN so great it’s listed twice). View all and Modify All have also been renamed with no functional change, because apparently that was a priority.
• Remember that ICU Locale Format change we’ve been warning about since [checks notes] FIVE YEARS AGO? ICU LOCALE FORMAT CHANGE CAN BREAK YOUR SHIT, PLEASE TAKE TIME TO REVIEW IT. Apex needs to be v45+, classes all need to be checked, etc. Yes we already told you to do this a year ago. If your org handles international data and you haven’t reviewed this yet, you’re gonna have a bad time.
• Breaking MDAPI Change that breaks anything targeting Roles and Subordinates from last release is now a release update enforced in 1 release. Seeing as the target API v is 45+, it makes this Old Version Retirement redundant to an extent
• If you used a Shared Domain Certificate for the Salesforce CDN update to single domain ASAP to avoid disruptions
• If you haven’t ever read a release note, you might have missed the Enhanced Domain Timeline. If you did, know that this release is the last one where your legacy domains work in production, and you can turn off these redirects manually

GENERAL STUFF

• Foundations (so, literally everyone who activates this free option) gives you free AI Agent allocations. Listing details in the Release Note was seemingly too hard for their marketing department so the allocations are: 1,000 Sales/Service agent conversations and 200,000 Einstein requests. It’s awesome to test out usecases.
• Related Lists now allow you to sort by multiple columns ! and show API Name so you can finally rename that “Orders (Really)” Object Name you left when you overrode standard Orders 10 years ago and never got around to fixing it
• Setup now has ads suggestions that are based on your Clouds and user actions. That will never go down a slippery slope, no sir.
• Per-Profile Search Filters configurable from the Search Manager. The search team continues their quest to make finding stuff actually work
• Better Lookup Search display and sort
• I don’t know if I like or hate this. Activity Field limits go up to 300 but only if you have less than 400 million activities. Who needs that many fields ? Why are they abusing the infamous WhatId, which is probably why they have those fields ? What happens if you have 350mil records and go above 400? So many questions, that Agentforce can’t answer properly (nice hallucination btw).
• The New Account email for Internal Users is now a modifiable Template so it can be less ugly !
• Salesforce (because of a random product, but whatever) now officially recommends setting up bypasses for Validation Rules and APEX Triggers, like we have done for the past 10 years :D - Too bad you still can’t pick Permissions in Flow entry criteria
• Account plans are now elevated from a notebook to standard Reports, but the Multi-Task and Object Sales Action Plan it’s tied to is actually quite nice for Sales teams. I’m not sure why they’re multiplying apps for people to get into though
• Forecasts get renamed (but not yet reamed) and get minor updates on their judgement module, and a BIG update regarding consumption forecasting which I’m guessing they’re using internally to see how much they can milk from your Data Cloud credits
• QoL login updates, you can now login with your email address instead of your username if you go through login.salesforce.com (and your company hasn’t deactivated logins from outside MyDomain) and reset your password with MFA instead of security questions, while the link doesn’t expire in a single click (probably because SF got tired of showing Microsoft Admins how to do proper whitelisting for email link inspections)
• Messaging for In App and Web gets Fallback Messages if there’s downtime, Messages straight from Account/Contact/Lead Records, better style management and cleanup
• Being able to import Third-Party Conversation History via API allows you to handle Cases in Salesforce even if they don’t have your Chat dollars.
• Voice is now available outside of Console Navigation and can be leveraged even if you only use Desk Phones
• Reassigning Omnichannel Cases was a pain point that now doesn’t exist anymore as the function is now standard.
• Data Mask import on Sandbox Refresh is nice. I mean it does require data mask, and you can do the same thing with SF CLI and snowfakery for free, but now you can pay for convenience.
• System Overview gets CMTD information. Whether System Overview will stay updated or go the way of Optimizer (RIP in pieces) is still to be determined.
• LEX Adoption Apps are getting retired, which is logical as if you’re still using Classic you probably are so knee-deep in dependencies you’ll never migrate without a new org anyway.

ANALYTICS

• You can now set a single email address that report notifications will come from
• Refresh a Single widget on a dashboard instead of the entire page and waiting 30+ seconds for everything to load again.
• Report Chart order follows Sort
• Custom Report Type Lightning view is now GA, previously Beta

ADMINISTRATION

• Permission Summaries allow adding and removing PermSets from a Group which is a huge timesaver. You can also remove custom permission but not add them because… ? Public Groups also get better Summary views for Access Control
• 'Enhanced ’ Permission Sets List views means that it’s not in Classic view anymore, and same for Role
• If Sharing Rules open visibility to External Users, you now get a warning in a pop-up to ensure you didn’t involuntarily share your entire client database.
• Salesforce now supports External Clients for SSO apps, SAML that is undergoing upgrades and require verification
• If you’re wondering where your Edit Filters button went, it’s in the Filters icon for “coHeRence”

FLOWS

• Screen Actions were triggerable via button, and can now also be triggered via value changes on Screens. Yes, that means you can dynamically refresh subelements or call data (example in the releasenote).
• Component Validation happens as soon as a User changes component instead of when they “next”, resulting in faster data correction.
• I almost missed this because I thought it was part of Orchestrator, but it really isn’t: Flow Approval Processes allow you to assign Approval Steps ,(including to Groups or Queues), send notifications regarding Approvals and manage Approvals via Emails. This seems to be the current solution to the fact that Approvals are generally OLD AF and cluncky, and brings some modernity to this very time-tested framework.
• Flow Stages make a comeback and get usability updates to make long flows more tolerable.
• Automation Home gets a better Flow Creation Screen, and vision on all Paused and Waiting Flow interviews
• QoL Extravaganza with Flow Versions (and navigation) in the Builder, Error and Warning Grouping, better Collection Filter element selection, and keyboard shortcuts, in addition to LIMIT statements on Gets and better handling of edge cases like emptied variables that were set, or homonym variables in subflows. Maybe at some point they’ll decide on a UI that won’t change every three months so we can gain productivity by not learning where stuff is again and again.
• Transform, the replacement for loop+assign, can now Join Collections into another collection.
• Send Email can now send Attachments, ContentDocuments, or Documents up to 35MB. It’s just too bad that you need to pass the raw ID in a text collection instead of a collection variable, but then again you can just use a Get to fetch that and then Transform, so good enough. Not.
• A new Flow Debug Experience looks lovely and is super usefu… wait, just for Marketing Cloud Growth ed. NVM.
• For FSL only, Data Capture Flows and Discovery Framework Data Capture Flows are two new ill-named but powerful tools that allow you respectively to add and edit Record Information in the Flow, or answer assessment questions from the “Discovery Framework” (a list of questions), in the FSL app.
• For Service specifically, you can use Flows as Milestone Completion Criteria, and manage Omnichannel controls from any Flow.

DEVELOPMENT

• SLDS V2 is out in Beta. Find new ways that your custom styling broke, especially with the DOM changes in Base Components, and this delicious change casually changing whitespace behavior, including hacks you might have done using empty style definitions! ! Also listed twice in the release notes for good measure !
• Agentforce for Developers is free in most editions and requires you to setup a VSCode Extension to use it. Let’s hope it’s better than their Agentforce on the help site.
• An understated release allows you to Pause and Resume Scheduled Jobs using APEX allowing stuff like an emergency button to suspend background calculations on your custom order bulk job that totally isn’t running with shit data just before your Sales meeting.
• @wire config and prop argument types must now match between the type of adapter for “type checking”
• Minor deployment limits change for people who hugely abuse Field Type Conversions. We assume that “The limit is 85 million custom field type conversions” means 85 mil records and not individual fields, for logical reasons. Limits also change for Long Running APEX requests depending on your license count.
• Component Import checks is phrased like better security for developers but feels more like something to stop people using packaged components in ways the developers hadn’t intended, which may break stuff.
• In other "title does not match content" releases, APEX Reparenting Restriction Enforcement is actually “we changed the error message you’d get and when you’d get it” instead of “we disallowed previous behavior.”
• ZIP files, a format that totally isn’t old and superseded by 7zip or rar since 1998, is now officially supported in APEX, a language that is evolving FAST. Alright FINE I’m elitist here this is a good feature but please support more stuff.
• Enhanced LWR is here for all LWR Sites even if you were previously ineligible due to URL schemes. LWR also gets file upload and Record List Components meaning that as time goes on during stuff in Aura is really just a misnomer for “accepting tech debt straight on day 1 unless LWR is completely unsuitable”
• The OpenAPI Document Generation gets minor updates. I’m putting it in because the day OAPI spec generation goes GA I’ll put it in Critical due to the amount of awesomeness.
• After APEX Exceptions last release, BulkAPIV2 jobs join the ranks of stuff you can follow via Platform Events
• Dynamic Formulas are GA. This allows you to not only run formulas on demand in APEX, but create and evaluate formulas without actually creating the field.
• Local Dev is GA and allows you, as before, to see locally changes you do to a LWC so you don’t have to deploy every single commit.
• New developer guide shows everything related to security in both Aura and LWC components, incl. LWS and Lightning Locker.
• On the “code validation side”, SLDS Validator joins Code Analyzer and Code Guru in the list of stuff you should be using frequently in your pipelines.
• LWC API 63.0 provides 0 changes which means that it’s a great moment to test your versioning because it’s required now.
• Defer Inactive Page Load seems like Salesforce optimizing their infrastructure costs and shifting it to us. If you specifically have long-loading pages that open in the back while users do other stuff, you need to turn this off.
• Headless Login gets security updates and PKey identification which allows logging in with pretty much any attribute as the identifier - the better error support helps handling (lol) this.
• Biometric Login for communities
• You get free Event Monitoring for Blocked Redirections and CSP Violations, with easy access through a PermSet - which is great because Release Updates impact those. It’s just too bad that we don’t get Event Logs for free too, because that shit looks dope AF.

DATA CLOUD

• You can now ingest Knowledge Articles into Data Cloud to use in RAG cases, adding to the ever-growing list of things Data Cloud can consume (and charge you for).
• Data Coud gets Filters on Summary Values which was already in last release for normal reports but is now just for Data Cloud because cash is green and we’re diversifying in ecology
• Flows that integrate with Data Cloud get more data type support when you get data from DMOs or CIOs, and proper Sandbox Support, indicating clearly that anyone buying it today is still paying the early adopter’s fee of “not quite baked yet techs”
• Continuing their LOVELY trend of releasing Release Notes for stuff that doesn’t properly exist yet in documentation, presenting: the SEMANTIC DATA LAYER ! Available “Starting November 2024” (source needed) according to the ever-helpful Agentforce, these seem to be a way to do multi-Object Joins with calculated fields and insights, including formulas and buckets while allowing users to create and edit reports based on this semantic and logical ground work afterwards. Which is straight up from big data land as far as usecases go.

LOSS-LEADING AI

• Einstein Bots is getting superseded (kinda) by Agentforce to literally no surprise at all. You can migrate service bots to Agentforce, and Knowledge Answers are now folded into Data Cloud prompting the question “why would customers who paid to implement a working proper solution less than 3 years ago pay for your usage based statistics model and another implementation cost”. But at least they know users get so frustrated they become negative or toxic while using it so they offer you a way to report on those behavior so you can improve your prompts and now can leverage Server Side Rendering which was announced last release
• Einstein can use 1.5kW of electricity, the monthly mean of a European household, to generate a very simply Flow based on a prompt or a very simple formula
• In one of the rare usecases I find immediately useful, the Einstein Flow Description Generator makes for better documentation, faster. It does require the Einstein for Sales/Service or Platform add-on license though.
• You can now use Autolaunched Flows from Prompt Flows, making it so your Agents can use functions you’ve already built.
• Agentforce for Service gets Supervisor integration to review if things are going well in a chat based on humans flagging these automated conversations, a truly cost-saving measure that presumably comes from their great success on their Help pages
• "Digital Wallet", which really couldn’t just be a part of "Your Account" I am sure, helps you track your AgentForce SKU Consumptions. The most interesting part for me is the actual SKUs being listed.
• Agentforce Reliability is in the works with Testing Center which allows batch testing your utterances, Agent Versioning, multi-language support (quality may vary)

DOGELAND
I considered renaming this section due to current worldly events, but I have decided that it has been priorly established that Dogeland is for ill-designed, inefficient and otherwise bad release notes, as indicated by the deep-fried Doge meme. As such I don’t think changing it due to politics of a country I am not a part of makes sense. Dogeland remains.

• :doge: We HaVe a TrUst LaYeR, TrUsT Us Bro. Companies that often can’t protect your data when they’re supposed to Now want to exploit that data, but “securely”
• :doge: Salesforce Classic getting an update, probably just for a single well paying client
• :doge: Old Customers are using API limits so much that it’s negatively impacting the entire service, so we’re making it worse for new users for some reason
• :doge: Here’s a release note for stuff that isn’t part of this release, might as well call these “the quarterly marketing blog posts” idk
• :doge: If you pay for quite literally 8 paid-for add-ons, you can pay even more so that an AI can do what you can already do albeit less well, but free, using basic scripts or Flow, so that your Sales team can probably ask the same questions again anyway “just to catch up” as the Sales Coach tells them to “build proximity and influence”
• :doge: Instead of doing an API, or Cthulu Forbid, using Letsencrypt, we added another hardcoded place where you can view your Certs. “wooo”.
• :doge: If I build custom components for standard shit it’s bad practice, but Commerce Cloud goes and does a full reimplementation of address fields including autocomplete, phone fields, Community Branding, menus??? and they love monolithic LWR componentsIDK, but they do get nice API improvements, one of which lets you CANCEL ALLLLLLLLLLLL THE ORDERS

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This abridged version was graciously written up by the SF Discord

We have a nice wiki: https://wiki.sfxd.org/

And a LinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sfxd/

Join the ~18000 members in the most active chat-based community around Salesforce these parts of the web at http://join.sfxd.org/

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