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
Winter '25 Abridged
The Salesforce Discord Collective Presents:
THE WINTER 25 RELEASE NOTES - ABRIDGED
Powered by ArgentForce
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!
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 '24 Abridged
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
CRITICAL STUFF
- This Release Update
which totally won’t get cancelled forgotten or delayed 5 yearsforces 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
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()
anddisconnectedCallback()
, 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 astaticresource
. 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 yearsallows 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
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 '24 Abridged
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:
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
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.
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 usingsf
orsfdx
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 yourDailyAsyncExecutions
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
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.
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
The Salesforce Discord Collective Presents:
THE SPRING 23 RELEASE NOTES - ABRIDGED
Now with an extra 10% reduction in content
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)
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.
- 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
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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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 enforcedin 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
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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
methodsFlows that you caninvokecall 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
adshelpful suggestions you might want to deactivate in-app guidance which just gets auto-enabled
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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 loadbe 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
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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) orAction
(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 anymoreyour 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
QuipSalesforce Anywhere - :doge:
VlocitySalesforce 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
The Salesforce Discord Collective Presents:
THE SPRING 21 RELEASE NOTES - ABRIDGED
As Exciting as the new Samsung WF50R8500A release
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 uselessgreat againffs I give up on the joke hereuseful. - 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
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…
- 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.
- 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
The Salesforce Discord Collective Presents:
THE SUMMER 20 RELEASE NOTES - ABRIDGED
Best read from 1.5m distance
- 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 jankypubsub
module found withlwc-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 outpubsub
. - 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
andsObject[]
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 annotation
controls 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/
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 variouschannels
), 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.
- 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.
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.
- 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
- Quick reminder that Salesforce will turn on LEX for all normal profiles in Winter 20. To quote ourselves, if you’re following best practices and not using standard profiles, this won’t affect you. And if you’re not following best practices, well now you have a reason to start =D
- A Critical Update will disable API permission on external users on ALL external profiles, INCLUDING CLONED. Check your communities. For cloned profiles, the permission just needs to be rechecked after activation. For standard profiles, seriously, just clone the darn profile.
- Permission handling for Apex Class callouts from Processes and Flows is changing and your invocables may fail if you don’t update them before the critical update gets activated. Check it.
- Lightning Web Components available through Lightning Out
- Customizable Forecasting is being retired
- Anonymous data collection from all einstein users allow better modelling and predictions… Well, better see what they collect and whether this exposes you to liabilities…
- Analytics Classic Designer (Wave 1.0) is being sunset, make sure to start converting your dashboards to Wave 2.0 before Winter '19 or forever lose access to them. Too bad the Dashboard Conversion funtionality suuuuuuuuuuuucks.
OOOH, SHINY!
- You can create Custom Notifications. And trigger them via Process Builder. We still hate process builder but that’s rather cool.
- In the same vein, you can create custom Prompts in Lightning Experience. Look for “In-app Guidance”. Also, note that this adds permissions to all profiles. If you had weird errors deploying profiles between api-version-mistmatched orgs, well, that’s why.
- You can define Data Types in APEX so they’re used in Flows. Read the page for more information, it’s tough to explain better than they did.
- Salesforce… Released a CMS for communities, after integrating with others. Whether that’s good or bad is up for discussion I guess.
- Continuations now available in LEX. Great when you have long-running calls and to optimize the number of queries.
GENERAL STUFF
- Lightning on iPads. Doesn’t look like much but that means a lot more managers will be happy. Is beta, requires activation.
- “Live Agent” is renamed to “Chat”. No link because that’s all they say on that page. If you’re french “Chat” is “Cat”. /r/uninterestingfacts
- They seem to be pushing Surveys still with a new free tier and some quality of life updates.
- FSL gets a nice update regarding Time Sheet Templates and better optimization
- Related Lists in LEX suck less now with text wrapping and up to ten colums !. Beta feature.
- Speaking of Related Lists you can now filter them without creating new views and stuff.
- High Velocity Sales got a few upgrades, the best of which IMHO is Open CTI in HVS
- You can reference Einstein AI fields in Formulas.
- Activity Capture now has Activity Metrics fields in GA, so you can more easily see concantenated info about activities in Salesforce and activities via Einstein
EMAILS
- You can add images in your emails now so you can add cat gifs to your support closure notifications.
- Salesforce now allows you to open your own mail client when clicking “email” on a record. Personal setup, not admin one.
- Speaking of mails, Files attached to mails now also appear in the Case Files related list. Agents everywhere rejoice.
- While we’re at it Emails can be scheduled to send later via Outlook and you can mark Email Adress fields as read-only in the email action oh and you can add links to knowledge in them too. So, yeah, Email updates.
SERVICE CLOUD
- Skill-Based Routing for omnichannel without code. Is Beta, but still, NICE. Combined with Flows being able to call skill-based routing this is great news for small-to-medium-sized businesses.
- You can Merge cases now. You know it’s spagetti code when using the same UI and functionnality but on a different type of record requires so much rewrite it takes litteral years to develop.
- Oh and Case Milestones now in LEX as well.
- Macros support IF statements. This changes how you can use them, like, a lot. Any Service Cloud org should look into this.
- Einstein Bots got some quality of life upgrades including a map visualisation of conversations, the capabitilty to have custom profiles to access more resources and APEX classes, etc.
PROCESSES, FLOWS, ETC
- The new Flow Builder has gotten a few updates ! Which brings it to parity with the old Flow Builder regarding undo, copy, paste and rich text (though that doesn’t support HTML). Anyway dis all great because the old Flow Designer getting retired next release.
- Remember those “templates” that did nothing last release ? They do stuff now.
- You can reference Custom Metadata Types in Process Builders
- Salesforce REALLY updated their help page for Flow Considerations. Worth a read
COMMUNITIES
- Communities Users can now create reports. If they had permission to view reports before, of course. This isn’t a license change, it’s a feature addition.
- Mass Actions now available in communities.
- Partners can send email from cases meaning you can have a low-cost low-feature service cloud offshore hub with this now.
- Navigation Changes
REPORTING
- Reports now can send notifications about criteria being met. Some weird workflow-report baby monster… but a cute one.
- Salesforce is now Excel by which I mean you can do row-level formulas instead of grouping-level. Beta feature. Lightning Only. Needs to be enabled.
- Historical Tracking now in LEX
- Conditional Formatting is now GA.
- Resizing column width in Dashboard Tables is now possible thank god. AND YOU CAN GROUP BY MEASURE OMG
ANALYTICS
- Finally making Dashboards easier to use when embedded on a Record Page with the ability to easily filter to the current record.
- VERSION TRACKING IN ANALYTICS!? Wh…why has this taken so long?
- There is a list of fields available when editing SAQL now, just incase you forgot the field called Oppty.Current_FQ1_Weighted. Oh and they made some text white.
- Who would have thought easily sorting your data in an analytics tool would take FOUR YEARS TO IMPLEMENT, but hey, it’s here now.
DEV
- You can set Checkpoints and lower batch size for Platform Events Triggers. Short version is you’ll hit limits less and can replay stuff.
- LWC can now subscribe to events
- LWC usable in Visualforce pages
- Process Change Event Messages in Apex Triggers
- Debug log max size increased to 20MB
- Aura and LWC now support declaring for factors meaning you can explicitely optimize for different devices
- New API Call in JS re: console including a way to see if an element is popped out.
- Encryption now allows case-insensitive queries
- Oh and minor extra but Prettier is now integrated in the Dev Console to format your stuff. Isn’t that cute yes it is eventhenameiscuteomg
LAUGHING, CRYING, WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE
- We normally don’t cover Pilots, but Salesforce is piloting muted permissions in Permission Sets. This may not seem like much but it goes against EVERYTHING that Salesforce has ever pushed regarding security configuration. If this goes live, make sure you only use this in specific instances, and document it thoroughly.
- As long as we’re on Pilots, the way dates are handled will change. Read up, devs.
- Salesforce keeps context when changing from Classic to LEX. Manly tears were shed. Womanly tears as well. Tears, tears of joy everywhere.
- The old Territory Management is getting retired - and nothing of value was lost. Also the new territory management is in LEX now.
- Yo we put Classic display in your lightning so you could classic when you lightning (beta featue). Samesies for the Activities display
-
Currency Field now displayable in Accounts and Opps. To quote @henry
#6864, “It only took ten years lol” - I… er. What ? Wut.
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
- LEX will be enabled for all orgs starting Winter20. If you follow best practices (you’re not using standard profiles, and people that have a custom profile that don’t need LEX have the permission for LEX turned off), this is of no matter to you. Otherwise, well, now you have a reason to start following best practices.
- Aura will probably be deprecated. Yes, seriously. Lightning Web Components are the future, deal with it.
- Base Data Storage increased from 1GB to 10GB. This is BASE storage, not per-license storage.
- New Flow Builder is out. Goodbye Flash, hi HTML5. Also looks better, is cleaner, and is generally awesome, but who cares, THERE’S NO MORE FLASH
- Force.com IDE is retireed in october 2019
If GDPR is important to you, you should read the entire "Email Experience" section.
TL;DR:
- New "Enforce Email Privacy" setting to enforce Don’t Market, Don’t Track, Forget this Individual, or Don’t Process requests.
- New Permssion "Send Non-Commercial Email" to prevent sales from violating GDPR
- New Email Statuses to ensure GDPR compliance
- MOAR DATA PRIVACY OBJECTS
GENERAL STUFF
- You can pin List Views now. FINALLY users can go to an object page and view directly what they need without an extra click and waiting for LEX to load over the course of a coffee being served! ... Except there's no way to set the default Pinned Lists as an Admin, and so your users will need to know this new feature exists. And do it themselves. For each object. Almost got it Salesforce... ALMOST.
- Cloning Sandboxes is now available for everyone.
- Gmail integration now much better and actually saves you time.
- We called it last time, but if this doesn’t convince you we can’t help you. Salesforce For Outlook will VERY PROBABLY be deprecated in future releases. Consider migrating to a cloud based solution.
- Permission Set Groups are now a thing and allow you to package permission sets together. Yes, Salesforce is pushing Permission Sets hard, and yes, you will learn to love it.
- You can Create objects and fields from a spreadsheet. If this works, it makes our horrible tool completely redundant… much to our pleasure. That thing was horrible.
- we'll use our tool a bit more as this was deleted from the release
- Einstein Activity Capture now syncs contacts and events, so other people can see stuff without the license. It also gets more reporting capaiblities.
FLOWS AND PROCESSES
- New flow builderrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. Yes we already said this and no we don’t care. NO MORE FLASH BABY
- Processes and Flows can now reference External Objects. That’s pretty much a game changer.
- Processes can now be triggered on Errors - specifically on Batch Apex Platform Event (BatchApexErrorEvent) and Platform Status Alert Event (PlatformStatusAlertEvent).
- Flows now have Adress field types in screens (and image too)
SALES CLOUD
- High Velocity Sales and Sales Cadences released. Despite the horrible, horrible naming, obviously done by someone who watched too much Blades of Glory, this is AWESOME. TL;DR: New view for Sales which suggests next steps, configurable by managers, not admins. Think “Guided Actions” but simpler. Great for reporting, adoption, and data quality. Requires additional license . It even integrates with Gmail and Outlook
- Forecasting gets some changes, with customizable forecasting being retired, as will be the old territory management feature. Loads of minor updates if you’re using the new Territory Forecasts.
SERVICE CLOUD
- Einstein predictions coming to cases
- Einstein Bots can be trained now, and also are available via SMS thanks to Livemessage
- Snap-ins got a few updates that don’t change much but make it something really nice. Migrating to Snap-ins from LiveAgent Buttons is recommended.
- Email Draft Approvals are now a thing in Lightning. This was only available in Classic before.
MARKETING
- Pardot allows you to choose which records are synced to Salesforce
- Pardot Connector and Initial Setup got a facelift
- Pardot allows you to use any tracking domain for Vanity URLs
- Reports now support Conditional Formatting
- Joined reports now in LEX for everyone (was beta)
- Historical tracking is now available in LEX
COMMUNITIES
Tons of small quality of life updates.
Like literal tons.
If you’re a big communities user you should read the appropriate section
- If you have a Google Cloud Translation API key, you can now display auto-translated posts/comments/etc in your community for your users. Neat. Only applies to FeedItem-related objects.
- Gamification now available for your users
- Lightning Web Components are available for communities as well. Don’t know about LWC ? Read the “Critical stuff” section
- Inline surveys allow you to see if your community content is any good.
- Better Google Analytics integration for audiences. Nope, not part of the release anymore...
- Sharing Sets now available for [Accounts, Campaigns, Orders](Use Sharing Sets with Campaigns, Opportunities, and Orders (Generally Available) and Contacts that have multiple accounts
- You can track how much a file is seen and downloaded.
LIGHTNING
- You can pop out Utilities in the console. Only works with standard utilities. Nice gimmick, nothing to whip a cat about.
- Subtabs in console have a menu now, and you can make a subtab a main tab. Yay-ish.
- Minor updates for parity with classic related to record transfering and teams which are literally “wow why couldn’t you do that before?”.
- You can sort LEX Email templates in nested folders now
- Events in LEX caught up to early 1990’s online tools, with recurring events, public calendars, and… file sharing. Much wow, such feature, nice release.
- Lightning Knowledge Migration tool is now GA, meaning it’s easier to get to that new version of Knowledge if you were a previous user in Classic.
- The Lightning Converter now tries to resolve issues wth your Classic VF Pages, or gives you advice to fix them. yay.
CPQ
If you use Avalara for Salesforce Billing, do not upgrade to Salesforce Billing Spring ’19 without following these instructions .
- You can now Download Quote PDFs from the quote preview page.
EINSTEIN ANALYTICS
- Dataflows can be set to run on event-based scheduling rather than a time-based schedule! This should be a great way to blow through your 24-hour Dataflow sync limit, but they also increased 24-hour Dataflow limit from 50 to 60. Not a huge change this release but it has doubled from 30 since this time last year.
- Need help troubleshooting why a Dataflow is taking so long to run? Well, this new feature isn’t that! Set Analytics up to send you an angry email if a Dataflow takes longer than a predefined amount of time to run! Let me tell you, this is super useful /s
- Combo Chart Upgrayedd! (too old of a reference? I’m sticking with it…) Ability to specify if a measure is a bar or a line and a bonus of being able to stack the bars! Sounds minor but is a pretty significant change to this chart’s usability.
- Einstein Analytics Classic (Wave 1.0) is being retired for good. In July 2019 all existing Wave 1.0 Dashboards will be disabled. Go ahead and start clicking that “Convert” button and watch the Dashboards explode because that button has never worked.
DEV
- The LEX Console API is now at parity with the standard console API
- Communities now support lightning-navigation, which helps you avoid broken navigation if Salesforce changes URL formats in the future.
- Lightning Container Components (Yo salesforce, might want to fire the person naming these things - confusing much?) allows you to embed React, AngularJs, or whatever other component in communities.
- You can auth users via a cert
- New way to Enforce FLS in SOQL Queries (beta)
- Visualforce View State Limit increased to 170KB from 135 KB
- VSC now allows you to rename symbols
BUGFIXES
- Fixed a bug where Hyperlink Target Value was ignored in LEX.
- Fixed an inconsistency where Community Plus users would always see cases they are a contact of despite sharing saying otherwise
- Fixed that bug where Processes would go “OMG NOOOOOOOOOOOOES” when you referenced a field from a parent record without checking if the parent exists. Though if you’re using the new Conventions you should actually do that check in the Triggering PB anyway.
LIGHTS ARE ON BUT NOBODY’S HOME
- Remember the Cloud Scheduler, where you could offer appointment slots ? Well it’s back as Lightning Scheduler. Available if you pay, and only for enterprise and Performance editions. Literally Pay2Win.
- Process Builders now have templates! … Oh wait, no, they added a checkbox in the metadata so you can say “is template”, but the checkbox does nothing. Eh, just ship it, it’s not like your users are used ot using metadata…
- New Flow Type to let users request help… They literally created a new object and matching permissions for what is a glorified LiveAgent chat start.
- Tests can now test process Scheduled Actions and Resume Events. “Declarative stuff done by an admin” but testing is done in code, shit never goan get used ayyy lmao
DIDN’T QUITE MAKE THE CUT
- BigObjects can now be created from the setup, instead of the metadata API. They day they remove the need to use Async APEX to feed data into BigObjects is the day I push that update to “Critical Stuff”. Still cool as hell.
- In Sandbox only, you can see references to a field before editing it. The day they push THAT to GA is going to be a damn celebration by all admins.
- Sandbox Email Adresses change format. Not super major nor interesting… but if you’re a dev and you’re waiting for that =example.com you’re going to have a bad time.
- Password complexity is better handled now… finally.
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
- Salesforce For Outlook is slowly being retired and no future patches are planned. All admins should schedule a migration to Outlook Integration or Lightning Sync ASAP.
- Salesforce will now enforce the 18-month retention policy for history tracking data. This limit was previously unenforced. If you report on older data, act now to preserve it.
THANK GOD
- YOU CAN CHANGE DENSITY SETTINGS IN LEX looking at a record page is no longer a russian winter snow simulation
- You can finally change multiple owners in Lightning. 2 years after the LEX Launch, they’ve decided it was time to add one button to rule them all.
- Dev hub available in Dev and Trial orgs start playing with SFDX :)
LIMITS
- Limits for number of flows, number of processes, and number of waiting interviews, have been severely increased. Automate All The Things
- There seem to be new entitlements for Flow Interviews per org. The wording makes it seem like these limits did not exist before. You may want to keep an eye on your usage and ring up Salesforce support if needed…
GENERAL STUFF
- You can enable the Akamai CDN to load lightning experience fast as the wolves of icewrack.
- You can prevent users from switching back to classic. Remember to throw them clean water in their cell.
- They added a search bar to list views. If you type in that, the global one, AND open a lookup field open, you could search while you search your search.
- Salesforce Surveys get better, but are still a less good GetFeedback.
- Service Essentials now boasts CTI and a dumbed-down community. Starts looking like a fair option for small companies.
- Flow Screens got a shit ton of small quality of life adjustments. Toggles, Dependent picklists, sliders for number values, email and phone validations…
- Salesforce Actively pushing the 1 Process per object structure I TOLD YOU SO (he yelled to no one in particular)
SALES CLOUD
- If you use collaborative forecasting and Enterprise Territory Management, the two are now compatible
- Forecasts in general suck less with better navigation and sharing. Territories get a lot of real small upgrades as well.
- When you switch opp owners, you can now retain edit rights on that opp. It’s particularly interesting because this could be a new trend accross objects…
SERVICE CLOUD
- Einstein Bots can now use autolaunched Flows. This looks ridiculously awesome.
- LiveMessage gest a few updates including Facebook Messenger connections.
- You can access LiveAgent Setup in LEX.
- Route Work to Agents Using Both Queues and Skills Simultaneously in the Same Org. I mean their title is perfect, not going to rewrite it.
- Skill Based routing beta now also available for liveagent
- Guided Actions renamed to Lightning Flows for Service, with minor updates.
MARKETING
- Pardot is now in Lightning Experience - hopefully you can stop being logged into two apps the entire day.
- You can Sync pardot campaigns with SF now
- Joined Reports in Lex (beta, limited)
- Report Subscription is now something that makes sense Basically you can subscribe other people. Spam Marc with ALL the Marketing Reports. He’ll Love it. Hey Mark ! You see that report of all leads from all time ? You’re subscribed daily now !
COMMUNITIES
- Sharing Sets now valid for all community license you can breathe easier, Community Plus license holders. Sharing sets also got better.
- New Template called Help Center Basically what old Kokua was - requires Knowledge to activate. Ironic, because Koa and Kokua got killed in this release.
- Guest Users Will be able to access Flows. WILL be. It’s not available upon release.
- Akamai CDN activated by default for communities. Faster loading times yay.
LIGHTNING
- You can Use Kanban on the Recently Viewed lists. nice.
- The Lightning Usage App is now better, giving you stats about where users switch back to classic, page load times, per browser, etc.
- They remembered Console Users also ned to edit browsable tabs
- List View Sharing In Lightning because migrating features that are more than 10 years old still requires celebration.
- Why ?
- Email Opens now tracked in the Activity timeline of records. Nice.
- You can schedule recurring events but it’s still in beta. Small Indie Companies can’t reinvent everything, recurring events are hard…
- Filter Component Visibility via Permissions This is actually REALLY AWESOME.
DEV
- Salesforce, for the second release in a row, actually delivers something you care about, and implements the
System.callable
interface. To quote the RN, ’the Callable interface allows integrations in which code from different classes or packages can use common base types.’ - Apex Methods can now be Cacheable
- VSC can now connect to existing orgs, not just scratch orgs (beta)
- You can fetch images over HTTPS now with IMAGEPROXYURL, and isolate third party content via Iframes. Salesforce likes you isolated, and if it doesn’t have to look at you. So sweet…
-
Class sharing can now be
inherited
from a parent class - New components including beautiful maps using google maps.
- Minor change that’s a huge QoL: you can edit custom metadata records in memory within Apex meaning you can calculate a result, use that in your code as-is, and then commit the result via async api - instead of waiting to see if the async job had completed so you could resume operations.
ANALYTICS
- Not going to lie, Einstein Analytics got a damn fair share of upgrades this time around. If you use Eintstein Analytics, Read the release notes section
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
- Salesforce now has a dedicated help page for compliance (https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=data_protection_and_privacy.htm&type=5)
- Salesforce has a new standard object which stores "privacy preferences". Does not come with any standard automation. Works with the Individual object. Search for Data Protection and Privacy in setup to play with it.
CRITICAL STUFF
- LEX Changes its URL format. Critical Update planned for next release. Update anything relying on URLs. (https://releasenotes.docs.salesforce.com/en-us/spring18/release-notes/rn_general_enhanced_urls_cruc.htm)
- Salesforce Surveys is now GA. If you're a consulting firm stop selling GetFeedback… Because SF Surveys REALLY looks like getfeedback.
- STOP SELLING DEDUPLICATION SOFTWARE. SF now has a standard "Duplicate Jobs" which will run on your existing DB and merge duplicates. Available on business or person accounts, contacts, or leads.
- OMNICHANNEL NOW SUPPORTS SKILL BASED ROUTING. Much wow, such flexibility! no really this is going to change a lot of things. No more idiotic queues per skill/language/whatever. Just nice features. (That were developped years ago by all their competitors.)
- JWT Token Is Now Longer
- Use without sharing for @AuraEnabled Apex Controllers with Implicit Sharing (Critical Update)
- API Access for <lightning:container* Apps Is Revoked (Critical Update)
- Remove Instance Names from URLs for Visualforce, Community Builder, Site.com Studio, and Content Files (Critical Update)
GENERAL STUFF
- Email Message, Folder, Return Order, Return Order Line Item, and Survey are searchable. The main one is EmailMessage. If it's shared across what they put on "Service", here are the indexed fields for emails: Bcc Address, Cc Address, From, Address, Subject, Text Body, To Address, All custom fields of type text, text area, long text area, rich text area, email, and phone.
- Lightning Dialer gets a Call Monitoring feature in beta.
- Integrations for both O365 and google got a few updates. Nothing major apart from creating records from unkown adresses.
- Salesforce stole reddit terminology and is now using upvotes (https://releasenotes.docs.salesforce.com/en-us/spring18/release-notes/rn_networks_updown_count.htm)
- Quip can now be integrated for Files
- It seems you can now use lightning components in Flow Screens ! That's going to look super nice. (https://releasenotes.docs.salesforce.com/en-us/spring18/release-notes/rn_forcecom_flow_lc_screens.htm)
- You can upload Files through a flow :D :D
- Include Encrypted Fields in Skinny Tables (Generally Available). Good news for our big data buddies
LIGHTNING
- … you can finally customize your own navigation in lightning. Let's take a moment to celebrate that LEX is no longer 15 years behind classic. woo :party:
- you can also theme LEX now! They really all-out to feel like a mid-200's web-app.
- Quick Text and Macros are now available in LEX for "most" objects. No documentation linked so we'll need to play with this ourselves.
- They're REALLY pushing Einstein this release. there's a new Readiness Assessor in the setup you can check to see if your org is ready for Einstein, and loads of updates on einstein itself (https://releasenotes.docs.salesforce.com/en-us/spring18/release-notes/rn_sales_einstein.htm)
- Paths now available for Accounts, Campaigns, Cases. Also not limited to "Status" and "Stage" anymore for standard objects.
- THEY REMEMBERED ACCOUNT HIERARCHY EXISTS. Congrats SF!
- Lightning report builder a bit better. Still does not handle: Joined reports, Row limit filters, Dashboard Settings menu
- you can now wshow or hide components in record pages, the home page, etc.
CONSOLE
- Lightning Console Sucks less and closes the feature gap with classic a bit more : web tabs, CIT methods now available, and you can now detect the style of the console you're being displayed in as a VF.
- flows can now be executed as tabs in a console and tied to a record ? Need to investigate, docs unclear.
SALES CLOUD
- There's a new linkedin integration relying on LinkedIn Lead Gen. Let's see if this one lasts more than two years…
SERVICE CLOUD
- You can now insert Knowledge Article contents in Emails. I know a few customers who will be happy…
- Field Service now tracks returns.
- Macros no longer look like you need to install GreaseMonkey and know powershell to execute them.
- Same search update and path update as above. Cases get path, emails can be searched, woo, happiness.
- Omnichannel supervisor now better and LEX compliant
- You can now use WFs and Triggers on Agent Work and Service Presence. Finally some flexibility on when agents acept an item and what you can do thereafter!
- Assignment rules now also route Social Customer Service Cases. Why that wasn't the case (get it?) before is beyond me.
MARKETING
- Beta: connection between pardot campaigns and salesforce campaigns available.
- Communities & Marketing Cloud integration via Journey Builder for Communities. https://releasenotes.docs.salesforce.com/en-us/spring18/release-notes/rn_networks_jb_ga.htm @tibo
COMMUNITIES
- New case deflection components
- Set Different Login Policies for Salesforce and Community Users (Beta)
- Login as Community user now a pain in the ass security wise. (https://releasenotes.docs.salesforce.com/en-us/spring18/release-notes/rn_networks_security_auth_login_as.htm)
- New libraries component for viewing files in a nice way :)
DEV
- Apart from the critical stuff, some new objects and API changes as usual. Really not much to skin a cat about.
This abridged version was graciously written up by the SF Discord https://discord.gg/6eQFVUv
WINTER 18 RELEASE NOTES
WINTER 18 RELEASE NOTES
- THE ABRIDGED VERSION- NOW WITH MORE JOKES AND SARCASM
CRITICAL STUFF
- SALESFORCE DX IS NOW GA OMGWTFBBQ
- The Salesforce CLI Also wooooo
- LEX changes how it looks. More data per square centimeter, less whitespace, and a nice background. No, you can't change the background.
- LIGHTNING REPORT BUILDER IS OUT (in beta). nice interfaces for reporting yay. Still can't do Joined reports, though…
- Enabling Person Accounts is now "streamlined", meaning they now make you check a checkbox before actually logging a case.
- We can activate multicurrencies without Support now, though, so that's nice
- Process Builder Events! Start process builders swhen "events" happen. (see documentation, can't summarize that)
- CUSTOM SETTINGS NO LONGER SUPPORTED IN LEX LIST VIEW COMPONENT.
- SAML Signing Certificate Has Been Retired
GENERAL SALESFORCE THINGS
- The lightning readiness check is a bit more awesome. Tell your clients about it if they want to migrate.
- Global search now allows you to find stuff even if you misspell it. They finally got to where Google was 15 years ago.
- Einstein Lead Scoring is available in Classic now.
- Einstein Activity Capture is now available for Exchange
- Lighting Gmail sync is now better and offers two-way event sync
- Release notes now have a Marketing Cloud section ! …. but it just links to the Marketing Cloud ones. Sorry
- Skype for Salesforce is now GA.
- Flows are now translatable without doing all that customlabel+formula shit.
- a new "Time" field type (BETA). It stores time, but it won't save you time. I would make more jokes but i'm out of time. Can someone create a field ? :smile: LIGHTNING
- They updated Lightning Console Apps. They still suck though, and don't have things like notifications. Don't put Service Clients in LEX unless you know exactly why.
- "Navigation Rules" allow you to load, in LEX Console view only, all the related records of a record. maybe that's useful ?
- Lightning now has keyboard shortcuts. RIP Chrome extension.
- we can now mass edit records in LEX in list views, and apply changes to pu to 200 records at a time
- we can merge personaccounts now.
SALES
- updates for Campaign Influence mutliple campaigns per opportunity, etc.
SERVICE
A. LEX
Current general status: to study. Updates are starting to make LEX somewhat service compatible. still very bleeding edge though.
- Milestone component is live now, though, so yay for that :p
- Live Agent is also LEX compatible now
- they also added Macros
- Community 360 is live. Basically a lightning component that allows you to see a customer's activity in communities.
- Lightning Knowledge seems to be getting more awesome. Now has embedded videos and stuff.
B. CLASSIC
- Omnichannel now has a Custom Requested DateTime field. It should be used to prevent a case going back to the end of the queue when being rerouted after an agent has refused a case for example. But, Seeing as Omnichannel assigns older elements first, this means that you could Theoretically use this field to prioritise omnichannel work items coming in by arbitrarily giving them an older timestamp than reality… Need some time to play with this.
COMMUNITIES
- Setup is more thourough when creating a new community.
- UI Improvements and changes.
- Dynamic branding is here ! One branding per Audience!
- Partner Central is online. It's a partner portal but more beautiful.
- Communities support Path components.
- New Community type: Customer Account Portal.
- FINALLY we ahve a "Blank" community template so we can host pages behind login screens easily.
- CMS Connect supports Drupal, SDL, Sitecore, or WordPress.
- You can use custom fonts in a community, Salefsorce offers a free CDN for communities, more stuff can be customized in the Builder, etc.
- You can embed Flows in Communities. Oh Yeah.
- File Sharing with communities became "easier" ? We should be able to set visibility on upload now. To test. No info about Lightning Experience.
- YOU CAN MANAGE COMMUNITY LICENSES AND LOGIN AS COMMUNITY USERS IN LEX. WOOOOOOO THEY REMEMBERED ABOUT FEATURES.
- Supposed Enhanced Changeset support. Actually sucks. Don't use it.
DEV
- new Lightning Component Library (beta)
- improvmeents to the lightning framework as usual
- new FindDuplicate methods. They find duplicates.
- updates to test classes, with parallel running.
- User Interface API is now GA
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
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.