Winter '20 Abridged
The Salesforce Discord Collective Presents:
THE WINTER 20 RELEASE NOTES - ABRIDGED
Can we speak about the fact that “winter” releases come out when it’s still 35°C like seriously the logo has palm trees
Welcome to the hospice
- Original Territory Management Is Being Retired
- Customizable forecasting soon to be retired as well
- Data.com Prospector and Data.com Clean Are Being Retired
Awesome stuff
- The new mobile app is kickass and customizable
- INTERNATIONAL EMAIL CHARS THANK DOG IT’S HERE
- Event Monitoring available with SHIELD. Get notified when people pull reports just after getting fired! Read setup instructions carefully though, unsubscribe from event channels while Salesforce upgrades your org to the Winter ‘20release, then resubscribe.
- Custom In-App guidance is GA, to help your users not feel lost in the sea of white that is LEX
- Everything about Flows this release. Seriously, read below.
- Reports get Row-level formulas, Field to field comparisions, and unique value counts. Everything you ever wanted.
Awesome stuff if it was still 2014
- The recycle bin. IT’S IN LEX. YES, AFTER FOUR YEARS. CELEBRATE
- Printable list views also make a comeback in LEX
Flows and PBs
If these guys continue delivering at this rate I’m going to have to do two release notes, one for that team, and one for all the others…
- SCHEDULED FLOWS you can uninstall Mass Action Flow Scheduler now
- CONDITIONAL DISPLAYS IN SCREENS
- New components in Flows: Lookups! Actual darn lookups, Notifications like PB, hell you can even use LWC in Flows now
- QoL updates: variables are easier to setup, activation directly in the editor as well as click-and-drag to select, and specific code coveage when deployed as active
- You can now subscribe to FlowDefinition Errors via Process Buidler, ensuring you always know if something doesn’t work
- Flows are now subject to Profile Controls per Flow
Put some varnish on it - old things that just got better in no particular order
- Mass actions on list search
- Search keeps catching up to google in the fabled 1990s search engine race. Salesforce also premiers its new pricing model of "pay for more users even if you have the right license to get this" with its new search personalization
- Account Teams and Opportunity Contact Roles now behave like normal objects and can be customized and automated off of
- Opportunity products get minor QoL updates that make a huge difference, with default quantities, quantities being hideable on the PL, and the addition page supporting dependent piclists
- Acitivties get a another coat of paint — by Spring23 it’ll look like a geisha — with less archival annoyances, easier completion and infinite scroll. Einstein can also sync repeating events in what is a contender for “Best ‘Duh’ update”.
Service
- You can find people to email from Cases more easily, the email templates suck less, and your users can even have signatures without workarounds now
- Omnichannel: a few new objects, the ability to say “YO OMNI, GET THIS CASE TO THIS PERSON NOW”, skill-based-routing declarative setup now GA, SECONDARY PRIORITY WOOOOOOOOO Finally you can escalate in queues and estimated waiting times for your clients. Omnichannel! Now also available in Sales with Digital Engagement. Is Omnichannel right for you ? Ask your AE Today !
- Chatter unread so your Agents can stop saying Chatter’s cluttered
Communities
- Remember that CMS we talked about last release notes ? It’s GA now and we still don’t know how to feel about it.
- Navigation Menus Variations now exist. Future updates will probably allow it to be dynamic per page but for now it’s meh.
- Case-specific components and pages dont exist anymore (but existing ones won’t get deleted), use generic record components instead
- Sharing Setting to set Guest access to private for all the things and guest users also won’t see all users, and also they don’t own records created anymore yay security.
- So as an obvious corrolary now you have Sharing settings for Guest Users so you can use sharing rules
- Partners and customer community users can send emails, no way that’ll ever be abused
Einstein Analytics
- A ton of new templates, Retail Banking, Wealth Management, Insurance, Manufacturing, and Health.
- Tables are finally catching up to Excel, kind of… Ability to show Sub AND Grand Totals in a table without hacking things together in SAQL.
- Number formatting in the GUI so you don’t have to futz with XMD anymore (yay almost Excel)! Still upset they took down https://wave-labs.herokuapp.com/ though.
- They said Wave 1.0 (Classic Designer) was retired in the last release. I guess you have another shot at watching the conversion tool fail.
- Introducing 15, 20, and 30 minute Dataflow Syncing and increasing the number of daily Dataflow runs to 120 instead of 60.
- Changing the name of a Step to a Query. Totally worth the time. Who wants to bet they didn’t change them in the dashboard JSON though?
- Automatic Dashboard, Dataflow, and Lens snapshots just in case you screw something up. Too bad they dropped the ball and make you access them through the REST API instead of any number of easier ways. I’m assuming we’ll see a GUI for this in spring.
- Users can finally get emails of Dashboards/Widgets by subscribing to them! Now your executives can have information delivered directly to them rather than asking you to pull it for them. They’re going to make you do it anyway but hey Salesforce made an attempt.
- Analytics in the mobile App! There are two pages about this in the release notes but no screenshots. There is however a broken link to sign up for a beta version of the app! Non-broken link here.
Others
- “Where is this used” now GA
Dev
- Public Methods Access only from same package in LEX components may affect your existing setup
- LWC in Flows, Flows in LWC
- Lightning Message Channel (Developer Preview) to communicate across the DOM, between Aura components, Visualforce pages, and Lightning web component
- Callouts Are Excluded from Long-Running Request Limit
- Share css across components
- Custom tabs for LWC
- FLS enforcing in APEX out of Pilot, now Beta
- Packaging: Second-Generation Managed Packaging Generally Available
- CDC events now includes list of fields changed
- BULK API nowuspports queries
- Formulas recalculation in APEX. that is HUGE — you can calculate formulas without a dml, in batch. let that sink in… you can basically have formulas lift heavy calculations and do it in an apex class without saving
Things are just horrible
- Yeah that Object Creator tool we talked about two releases ago ? They released it silently, and it’s completely broken. Can’t be used for anything. It mistakes rows for columns, doesn’t parse types correctly, can’t add more than 10 fields to the page layout. It is more of a disappointment than I was to my Ballet teacher.
- Hey if you modify page layouts on custom objects now, you can go get yourself a coffee, cause you ain’t seeing that for 15 minutes
This abridged version was graciously written up by the SF Discord http://join.sfxd.org/
We have a wiki as well now: https://wiki.sfxd.org/
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