Summer '25 Abridged

The Salesforce Discord Collective Presents:
THE SUMMER 25 RELEASE NOTES - ABRIDGED
This post was Human-generated and cost 15 units of caffeine to generate.

CRITICAL STUFF

Breaking MDAPI Change that breaks anything targeting Roles and Subordinates from last release is now a release update enforced this release both in prod and sandbox - requires updating any code that references RoleAndSubordinates in the sharing model
If you’re making API calls to myinstance.salesforce.com, you gotta change them to the MyDomain version (and you should also if you're still using login.salesforce.com) before Spring26.
The breaking SAML upgrade from last release gets enforced soon, so verify your SAML integrations now before they break especially if you’re still using outdated encryption standards

GENERAL STUFF

Continuing the Permissions Management timesaving stuff from last release, Salesforce allows you to edit perms for one object across all permets, edit them in summary view, edit which permsets are in a Group in a summary, edit tabs in Summaries. User Summary also gets more information. TL;DR manage permissions easier, faster… stronger ?
You know that thing where you try to deploy stuff in Prod, but you get some weird error and your test fails despite it working in sandbox ? Well now you can get Logs for the deployment as well and fix it. F’in A.
QoL updates: Deleting an Object that has Relationships now shows you a nice list with hyperlinks to allow deleting them more easily, Record Type Filters now offer values instead of forcing you to go back to setup just to get the Id, and You can now clear mappings for State and Country picklists in case you have many mappings that are not valid anymore.
“Cool Freebies with No Setup”: Dynamic Related Lists are now available on Mobile, Console view can now be given to Platform Users.
Einstein Activity Capture gets… WTF do I even call this ? "gutted and replaced by another concept of the same thing"? Like it’s back to what we are all doing in 2005 with Activities being created which does yield stuff like being able to use Flows on them for custom routing but counts against your storage limits, and the sync headers only option is nice, but WTF happened to the scalable AWS infrastructure that made most of EAC work ?

SERVICE

You can make your case comments have nice rich text and images, make your reps no longer have the right to mark customers as inactive and also give them the right to close cases via the button in LEX like you could in Classic 10 years ago. Benioff giveth, Benioff taketh ~~away~~ off ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°).
Entitlement setup sucks less, maybe ? I haven’t tested it, but the multi-object setup was a pain before, so having a single point to set it up and some better automation for entitlement mapping looks nice.
Messaging gets conferencing with multiple reps, a custom icon for the chat request button, Recaptcha integration (please let me use hCaptcha or something better than Google’s offering), and more event listeners so you can help your customers in a context-aware manner
When Email-to-Case fails to process an email, the requesting user now gets notified instead of crickets.
Single Email Sends now includes emails sent manually meaning someone sending one email every two minutes of a normal workday will go over the limit, not counting any automated emails.
Omnichannel has wait times for skills, and can now leverage status-based capacity for Calls, fully route calls including desk phones if you use Amazon Connect, which also now allows you to have individual phone numbers per user
Voice is now available on standard navigation as well as console, and supports hardware mute/answer/etc on select headphones. If you use Partner Telephony (meaning you have your own AWS contract on top of the Voice basic one) you can also leverage connect Chat now if you bought licenses for it

FLOWS

Debugging gets really nice updates, including cli integration for CI/CD pipes with Debug Summaries available for all Flows instead of just Marketing one release after publication, and Test record selection for send email and send sms
Flow Approvals get Recall Paths so you can control what happens when an approval gets recalled by a user, Cancellation so you can just stop an Approval without any further action, and you can trigger Approval Flows from Other Flows :) and … get Users to create a new Approval Process, that you need to activate yourself and double check, via an action? I don’t get it.
Output Resources in Configuration Panel is understated, but makes building Subflows that return appropriate data and refactoring much easier, so I’m quite a fan.
Send Email gets an overhaul that ranges from how elements are displayed in the Action section to better Template handling and text input, passing through better linked Record and sender email address selection as well as text-collection-based handling of emails for CC and BCC. They also decided to version Flow Actions because NPM dependency hell taught us nothin, and to hide parameters until you fill prerequisites so you can forget them faster, as well as arbitrarily enforcing when you can use Threading Tokens having learned nothing from last time they messed with those. ~~Oh and you can finally use a collection of ContentVersions as attachments !~~ Nah just kiddin you get to use a text collection, which is mildly better than the raw text from before I guess.
Screen Actions from last release are now GA
Screen Elements can now have custom width and vertical positionning so you can finally have more information density in Screens.
You can test whether you are in a FAULT path, allowing better error handling (and custom retries if you so wish)
QoL you get Expanded Search on click to find resources more easily, better selected picklist value display and icons on Choices as well, easier resource detail selection and bigger Async Path creation button. You can also FINALLY save an existing Flow as a template, probably best for use for Prompt Flows.
The new File Upload component makes it less frustrating to upload docs and verify if a doc was in fact uploaded. Also probably the same as the Development section one, which promises more updates and more support
The new Visual Picker component is huge and honestly doesn’t feel to good to use to me.
You can now use Flow instead of Apex to enable SSO in Experience Cloud which makes it much simpler. Except you’re still setting up SSO, which is mostly a Dev thing, like go explain this quite nice release about UserInfo surfacing from the IDP, but yay anyway :) I do like the Get User Data from JSON action though.

ANALYTICS

Tableau Next seems to be an actually new product, and is built on Salesforce’s Hyperforce backend rather than the standard Tableau servers. This explains why they’re pushing the AI and Einstein angle so much - they can use the Data Cloud infra instead of having to integrate with the multiple systems. DoA or Useful is what we’ll see in two years or so as per usual. Field Service seems to have a real usecase for this already.
Stuff from last release is now GA, like Refresh a Single widget on a dashboard and [chose an Org-Wide Email address to send Report and Dashboard subs criptions
You can now set a single email address that report notifications will come from

FIELD SERVICE

Admin side, migrating to Enhanced Scheduling just got easier and includes a readiness check, Schedule Optimization no longer queries a shitton of useless records, so it processes stuff faster, Optimization no longer gets confused when you change parameters during an optimization run (and handles conflicts better) and also allows Priorities to condition the result, you can use Buffers to ensure travel time includes basic stuff like getting in and out of the car
Your Crew Management tool now also gets color coding, and Capacity Planning allows seeing resource distribution and demand.
Mobile users can use Visual Remote Assistant to… provide remote support from the comfort of on-the-road ?
You can trigger Data Capture from Work Plans and can generate PDFs once Data Capture is done (and data capture forms get easier to configure). If you forgot (like me) what Data Capture is, it seems to be something that’s tied to most Industries clouds and allows question-and-answer type information collection which then get asked via OmniScript. Unless you’re Field Service, in which case it’s exactlsy the same but none of the documentation applies I guess ? FSL isn’t even referenced on those pages, they’re here

COMMERCE

Product Pages get a gazillion updates, ranging from video displays to Facebook/Instagram syncs, featured products, an interactive preview, dynamic Out of Stock displays, on-hover information (including images)
You can now manage marketing consent and subscriptions, including on the registration page as well as cookies via standard compoennts instead of building your own. Which is great but weird that it wasn’t there before.
Payments API now OpenAPI compliant and docs have changed location to here.

DEVELOPMENT

If you use CometD, you need to start listening for Disconnects due to “auto-scaling” otherwise you’ll miss events. As long as we’re speaking about breaking changes, Outbound Messages timeout cut by 66% to 20 secs
If you haven’t migrated to SLDSv2 yet, the SLDS Linter which you can install from here helps you find issues in your code and uplift your repo to v2. The SLD Validator will help you ensure you do good quality components from VSCode directly.
The Metadata Coverage Report is changing URL to here, and can be used to know how to configure scratch orgs for features as well.
The Component Import checks from last release now throw proper errors
Local Dev now allows viewing a component locally without prior publishing
LWCs now support ESLint v9 :D and also TypeSript(*limitations, preview, blabla)
If I understand this correctly, Dynamic Formulas now support you writing field references like you would in the UI (aka ‘as a template’), meaning you don’t have to set all your variables in code anymore.
The gazillionth change to base component structure is here, which serves as a reminder that you shouldn’t rely on that structure being stable, like, ever. I’m sure once they hit standards compliance they’ll just decide to extend the standard with some proprietary bull. “EEE” as Microsoft said.
InvocableActionExtension seems to be a new metadata-driven way to group actions together and specify how they will be displayed. Thing is - there’s no docs whatsoever. I imagine this is part of Salesforce’s push to build full custom UIs again.
LWR Sites have a standard File Upload Component now!
For Revenue Cloud amongst a slew of other changes which honsetly are like half the Release Note by themselves, one release allows you to use Apex Pre- and Post- Hooks to customize pricing on-the-fly.
If you use External Client Apps, which replace Connected Apps, and use those to build custom mobile apps that integrate with Salesforce, you can now set Lock Screen Timeout and Notification settings

DATA CLOUD

Custom Data Spaces allows you to split various areas of your business into distinct data silos. Break’m to build 'm back up again.
Marketing Cloud Growth gets AI Reports, Flows and Scoring, a weirdass “custom campaigns and flow improvement” which honestly feels janky AF when you use it, Custom HML templates, Repeater components to display lists in emails, and dynamic images, better consent management that doesn’t require your customer to fill a form before you collect the consent, and better reporting incoming visitors and touchpoint attribution. Your Brand Identity can now be 4 times as long, which is great for AI-generated content to get the base prompting right.
Marketing Cloud Growth Advanced also gets a Multi-Touch attribution campaign designer.

AGENTFORCE

In Service, live Translation-on-demand for Chat is impressive, follow-up email template kinda sucks, and Supervisors can monitor emails as well as Chats, and have a filtered list of Agents if required. If said supervisor likes typing sentences more than clicking a single button they can now update Agent statuses via Agentforce. You can also have Agents answer customers for easy requests like order followup.
In Sales, Reps can write full sentences rather than modify a single line on a quote; truly an innovation for the ages.
Conversation Transcripts can be used in Flows, allowing stuff like analyzing a single conversation through the lens of different prompts to help automated feedback, quoting, and handover to delivery. Nifty (but Conversation Insights is paid). Insights can now run on uploaded videos which makes me want to upload a version of the Bee movie and see how it likes that
Agentforce can now get context from the current open record on mobile - currently used in Field Service Mobile, probably going to be applied elsewhere in mobile applications later.

DOGELAND

:doge: Salesforce Go, probably named so Salesforce can catch all your dollars and has NOTHING to do with mobility, offers you in-context “training” ~~and ability to buy licences on this totally-not-ads content~~ which features multiple clouds because “Your Account” wasn’t good enough a place to beg for cash like an industrial parking lot phone-booth
:doge: Learning nothing from Aura’s failure, Salesforce decides that Agentforce needs Proprietary Types to manage styling
:doge: From the company that silently said "Yeah actually we’re sending all your data to the LLMs fuck your trust", now “Trust us more:; we VEriFy ThE Data BeFoRe EXpoSInG It”. (no actual mention of what that means but the words sound great). One can hope that at some point it'll be enterprise-ready.
:doge: You can now request Metadata with all its dependencies via the Metadata API… but the only supported object is Bot. Let’s forget all the other places we have dependencies. :)
:doge: We released a new Partner Portal template that’s still built on Aura, so you get 0 future proofing and 0 of the current advances of LWR.
:doge: A single GET component can now fetch Multiple Related Object types and returns them as multiple collections within the same GET element. Sounds great, except there’s no way to reference those records. Yes, you can GET but not use them. at all.
:doge: sure, Send Email action makes it easy to select an EmailTemplate, File for Attachment, or Related Record. Except they're hardcoding the ID value of your selection, enabling you to experience failed deployments, and other such related festivities. So much for Salesforce's own best practices to never hard code ID values.

:doge: Trust gets personalization, helping you see only statuses that you care about. Then again, Trust websites are supposed to be low-complexity high-availability things, and Salesforce’s is already neither. :doge: The MDAPI got an update! Field Conversion errors are better handled. They even offer automated recovery for field conversions… nah just kidding, the fix is “do it manually” lmao

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