Spring '23 Abridged

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

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