Winter '21 Abridged

The Salesforce Discord Collective Presents:
THE WINTER 21 RELEASE NOTES - ABRIDGED
By reading these release notes, you forfeit your place to Dreamforce this year in favour of an SFXD member. Oh wait…

CRITICAL STUFF

Guest User Nerfed to hell, literally unplayable. May break Aura/LWC customizations.
Email RefId Nuked, now uses Header. Retrocompatibility guaranteed, but if you abused RefId in the past with formulas and such, dis Bad News™.
Dynamic Forms Now GA. It’s critical because mid-term it means Page Layouts gonna be retired. (As always, this is wild speculation but we’re often right).
Flow Engine now API versioned. No more critical updates, better control. Yay. Probably Why most Updates are Postponed

GENERAL STUFF

A rather discreet note highlights the creation of Customer 360 Guides and Solution Kits which contain context-driven architectural charts and designs considerations. Now THAT’s a great resource
MFA getting easier which is a good thing for Enterprise software
Recycle Bin Search Is Being Removed due to performance issues. Probably because it’s not stored in the same DB in the backend which isn’t optimized the same way as the other tables are
Optimizer gets new Security Evaluation points, great what with all the changes happening lately
Orders continue their pursuit of not sucking as much by now following the rest of the platform re:triggering automations on save. I still hate them though. So Feverishly
Reps can now let email recipients choose from offered meeting times and it’s not limited to Lightning Scheduler woooo
Salesforce now has an HTML Email Builder woooo
Performance Review For LEX Pages =D
Profile Management got a few updates that make Profile handling more secure.
Perm Set Groups for PE, further solidifying that the full move to Perm Sets is happening at some point down the line

SALESFORCE CORE

Submit For Approval button now supports conditional display options
Kanban view shows you Changed Records, a nice QoL Improvement
Salesforce now gives you Prebuilt Flows, Macros, and Quick Texts so Agents can be more productive
Agents can now transfer Skill-based Omnichannel assigned items
Fields can now be auto-added to existing Custom Report Types on creation (checkbox in the field creation wizard, defaults TRUE after activation). Good for lazy admins, less awesome for admins that do custom sections.
Notifications support Page Reference Navigation I can’t wait for FRIDAY FRIDAY GOTTA GET DOWN ON FRIDAY

FLOWS

Brand Name Screen Flows now redundant, Generics now on market
Before Delete operation now available for Triggered Flows. Seems to be for related record updates more than anything. Does not replace APEX BeforeDelete Validations.
OCD Users rejoice - no more 1 pixel weird lines with AutoLayout
After a meditation session in the ancient caverns at the top of mount Workflow, the team decided to Allow evaluation only on specific changes, also on decision nodes. Sizable performance increase.
All Flow Elements now support AND, OR, and other operators
Various QoL Improvements with Record Traversing In Triggered Flows and Global variables without Formulas, as well as trigger type column in Flow Lists
Yo I heard you like LWC so we put LWC in your LWC so you can LWC while you LWC LWC

/* This release got a few very anticipated updates for testing and reproduction. Enterprise users rejoice */

Meet The Spy. You can now Impersonate Users while debugging in Sandbox.
SF Maps team hired to work on Flow builder, releases Routing view on debug. Rated 0 stars on google play “Won’t direct me to bakery”.
Flow Errors now send you to where the error is

For anyone who cares, we still don’t recommend replacing all your PBs with triggered Flows. We do recommend starting to look into how you will do this in the next releases though. It’s coming fast.

~~COMMUNITIES~~ EXPERIENCE CLOUD

Customize Communities with Code Settings for Embedded Chat and Channel Menu
Better Page Management with custom page nesting and url edition
Record Detail Based Audiences in what is low-key one of the best things to happen to communities. Fully dynamic audiences per records based on criteria. Holy crap.
External Users can now switch Accounts and manage other users. Seems to be related to an old B2B commerce feature
CSP settings enforced for inline scripts
BYO Communities LWC pilot getting some nice updates - if you’re planning a BYO comm, probably wait until this is GA or request pilot before deploying an already deprecated Aura one

EINSTEIN

T-800 joke goes here; something about an army ? Einstein Bots got easier to setup for newbs and give you MOAR POWER when automating stuff
Predictions and Recommendations for you and for me and the entire human race.

DEVELOPMENT

LWC now has a cache busting function when you wire data from Lightning Data Service adapters. Should be useful in replacing the refreshApex function which was a little confusing to use.
SLDS CSS HOOKS. Hooks is not an acronym here.
Lightning Scheduler now supports PE on events creation or changes, also provides interface to fetch external calendar availability.
Embedded Chat now supports server-side code injection so you don’t modify your webpages uselessly.
You can now Patch Salesforce. No, not that way.
Scratch orgs pull a Ditto and now clone the Shape of an Org
You can now nullify your nullpointerexception
Platform Events now more reportable and now support APEX callouts anywhere within an existing transaction cycle by using Publish Immediately PEvt.
Custom Notifications can be sent from APEX
Apex now has runtime detection. This can be used to detect if something isFuture() / isQueueable() etc, it should scale much better. Combined with new sObject Error Methods this makes debugging better.

DOGELAND

:doge: YOU CAN PUT IN-APP GUIDANCE ON EDIT AND NEW Annn… oh wait it’s part of mytrailhead, which is expensive, despite being listed as a lightning experience thing. Oh great. Actually since they made it energy-consuming to figure out what’s paid or not I deem the entire Lightning Experience Engagement section worthy of a Doge award.
:doge: When Bypassing Security Fully becomes Standard Operating Procedure you probably should take a moment to wonder how we ended up here.
:doge: Someone at the email team decided to up the size limit except the other providers won’t care, meaning you’ll probably get bounced emails… ???
:doge: No one seems to know if Salesforce Anywhere is stable, or useful, or what it does. Not the best product launch I’ve seen, though the product itself seems ok I guess ?

OTHER

:100: I don’t want to do a whole anti-doge section but this is how you communicate a feature pull. It’s precise, apologetic, to the point. Can’t be done better. Kudos.
Translation Imports suck less now Someone went spelunking.
Seriously Release Notes team can you stop putting ads in the release notes? It gets tiring. You have a marketing blog to be fake-happy about features.

This abridged version was graciously written up by the SF Discord

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Winter '21 Abridged

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