Spring '25 Abridged

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

CRITICAL STUFF

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

GENERAL STUFF

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

ANALYTICS

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

ADMINISTRATION

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

FLOWS

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

DEVELOPMENT

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

DATA CLOUD

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

LOSS-LEADING AI

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

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

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

This abridged version was graciously written up by the SF Discord

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Spring '25 Abridged

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