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 impacts API Users, and yes, criteria for MFA will probably change. 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.

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. Stuff is 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 LWCeither via ScreenAction (no more Aura wrapper) or Action (literally LWC as QuickAction !)
You can now create Reports on Emails to see ~~how useless they are it’s 2021 people barely read non-operational emails anymore~~ your awesome email campaign statistics
Picklist Behavior Changes which have more impact as org size goes up. Check if there’s any problem with your processes
Salesforce has done a few updates for accessibility and ux ☺
Salesforce is bringing its least-used features to LEX so it can finally kill off classic in a few years
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)_/¯
Teams integration now GA
If you were an existing Amazon Connect client, you can now use Service Cloud Voice with your exising account
Bots continue to assimilate language , easier multilanguage support, and can answer with Articles from KAV
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
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

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 experiation date, meaning you can grant temporary rights to users.

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

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

FLOWS

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

DEVELOPMENT

Apex Unit Testing With Flow And External Services, see second bullet point of “Flows” section.
force:createRecord now allows Dependent Picklist Default Values

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

PARDOT

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

DOGELAND

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

OTHER

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

This abridged version was graciously written up by the SF Discord

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