Summer '24 Abridged

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

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CRITICAL STUFF

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

GENERAL STUFF

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

SERVICE

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

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

FLOWS

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

DATA CONSOLIDATION AND VISUALISATION

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

DEVELOPMENT

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

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

DOGELAND

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

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This abridged version was graciously written up by the SF Discord

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