Winter '22 Abridged

The Salesforce Discord Collective Presents:
THE WINTER 22 RELEASE NOTES - ABRIDGED
When you gaze into the Release Notes, the Release Notes gaze into you

CRITICAL STUFF

Mandatory MFA is still coming. Last release we highlighted that it wasn’t exactly the best thought-out rollout. Things are getting better documented now, more Identity Verifications will be available, and there’s a full-featured multi-lingual rollout pack you can download to ease change management. There’s still concerns for now if you’re a Managed Services shop though.
Developers consume even more coffee than usual because of Updated Locale Formats and more timezones resulting in old (but bad) code potentially breaking (if it was bad) and more locales to support (which is never fun). The DeveloperName field also now requires either View Setup, or View DeveloperName permissions to be viewable. I expect this’ll have nice, fun impact on developments around the world, resulting in soaring prices for Coffee stock #superstonk
External Users will see even less stuff about other users. This will become mandatory in a year, so start using this ASAP to mitigate impact.
Product2 now subject to Sharing Settings and Sharing Rules (Release Updates), defaults to Private for External Users. Impact for Subscription, Ordering, and Renewal-based Experiences to be expected. Test in Sandbox.

GENERAL STUFF

Scoping Rules, which filter down search results, make a great complement to Restriction Rules, which filter down record access. This continues the trend of closing down permissions instead of opening them up. Cool, but also great for spaghetti.
Einstein Search allows Profile-level Object targeting so Finance users search invoices by default and Sales search Opps.
In-App Guidance now has Targeted Prompts - as a quick reminder you get three Walkthroughs for free and there’s a nice FAQ. IAG also gets a few updates like RT-specific prompts and Prompts in Setup
Dashboards can have Dynamic Gauges meaning the Max is based on a field, meaning this is awesome.
Einstein Activity Capture can now create Events as Activities for your reporting joy but watch out for Storage limits. Also tries to avoid you sharing sensitive info, whether external or internal
My Domain is mandatory and has more features that also restrict non-domain logins or speed up resolution so TL;DR you gotta activate that.
Omnichannel can now open related records as well as the main work item for more context, and gets Planning by Shifts
Inline Editing on Reports gets easier and on more data types.
You can route Service Cloud Voice Calls with Omnichannel Flows. How cool this is cannot be overstated - previously you had to have Omnichannel on one side, your CTI on the other, and pray they play nice (this feature is part of the Omnichannel Flows routing thing from last release that I loved already). Voice also has client-side call recording approval and becomes Desk Phone Compatible.
Tasks get PK Chunking for TaskRelation, a new CompletedDateTime and a new Sorting order

FLOWS

Orchestrator is out of Beta. UnofficialSF has some nice documentation about it, including a tutorial series. TL;DR Orchestrator flows are Flows that create Stages for you and handle their update and completion status, allowing you to call a Core Action (incl. Flows, Global Actions, etc) on any step, and handle automation based on step completion. It’s like an overcharged Approval Process. They can be embedded in pages or triggered via record updates. They’re great.
Record-Triggered Flows get a lot of love with a new Trigger UI, Scheduled Path updates and Subflows (SUBFLOWS EVERYWHERE!!!) — Complex logic in Record Triggered Automation here we come!
External Services get Native Mulesoft Action Support and Different API limits which are actually worse if you have more than 25 external services registered, but better otherwise. They can also be called from Record Triggered Flows via an Async path, so your admins can now ~~mess with your non-Salesforce systems as well when they do a data load~~ be more productive
Debugging keeps getting better! Event Monitoring clients get a bonus
QoL: Auto-Layout is less punishing. Also You can rename the standard buttons which is great for UX. Choices get some love
My personal QoL favourite: the Roll Back Element removes previous DMLs on fault, which means I don’t need to create all those Delete elements manually.
Run Flows for Experience Users is being retired. You’ll get more accurate permissions soon ™

As a quick reminder, you now have:

Orchestrator, which is a meta-flow management Engine
Screen Flows, which display & collect information and take actions based on user Interaction
Record-Triggered Flows, which take action based on record information on DML operations, whether BEFORE or AFTER saved
Scheduled Flows, which schedule a Flow Interview for later, run as batch on a subset of records defined in the Schedule, and group records with similar operations together even if they are in different Interviews
Scheduled Paths, which trigger from a Record Triggered Flow, and schedule a Flow Interview for later, and group records with similar operations together even if they are in different Interviews
Async Paths from Flows, which allows you to call External Services, and are processed in their own batch

There’s quite a few help articles about this, but you might want to train your Admins into all these ~~delta~~ variants as otherwise the terminology might get confusing.

DEVELOPMENT

Salesforce Functions, aka evergreen, aka lambdas for Salesforce, can now be Mocked in APEX
Lightning Web Security (beta) replaces Lightning Locker for LWC, allows cross-namespace component use, is SES compatible. Also allows you to use LWS for your LWC on your LWR sites. At some point we’ll do the entire LWAlphabet, but I guess Google would copyright that.
Dynamic Interactions allow Devs to expose events in their components, which will then be used by Admins via the App Builder to make the components react to actions taken on a Lightning Page or a List
Performance of both Pages and LWC is now easily measurable
If you do more than 2500 actions in a boxcar request you’ll now get an error, instead of horrible slowness. Tl;DR Salesforce forcing you to write less shitty code.
Secure Static Resources for Lightning Components release update is delayed indefinitely with the best message to that effect ever: “The release update won’t be enforced in its present form. Don’t enable it.”
Packaging now allows removing Metadata elements from 2GP, and converting 1GP to 2GP is coming. A CI/CD wind blows over all new projects. Also, Appexchange Packages no longer eat up your CDC limits, and you can Package Flows that can be overriden
You can do Data Binding for CMS content in LWC for Experiences

EXPERIENCES

Microsites are a new CMS-centric landing-page template . I would wait until Site Archival comes out of Pilot to use it extensively though.
Audiences in your Audience so you can audience your audience. Yes I do this joke a lot. I still like it.
LWR is the future, but Aura sites are here to stay for a while. Advise looking into LWR as you can - it will become bigger as time goes on.
Salesforce now serves Experiences via its CDN, but as a tradeoff you now need Domain-specific Certs. Custom Domains are also routed via Edge Network (this). TL;DR faster loading and resolving times.
Experience Buttons and Forms can now be branded declaratively with no CSS overrides. :)

INDUSTRY PACKAGES

FSL gets QoL updates with templated shifts, timezone conversions, better date navigation and recurrence planning. Also allows customers to Self-Serve appointment scheduling via Flows -tutorial here
There’s a new CSG Customer 360 guide. I almost put this in dogeland because of the formatting, but if you go to the actually Guides Homepage and then check the different guides available it’s still a GREAT resource. So… 2/10 on the release note, 7/10 on the actual Guides concept. Let’s see what they do next.

DOGELAND

:doge: I still say putting Salesforce Scheduler in the “Overall” section is false advertising just throw it in its own section or do an entire section “Salesforce Add-ons” it shouldn’t be that hard to know if something’s free or not chrissakes
:doge: A cute one for once but the Bots team tried to pull a sneaky one and dusted off some notes from last release and shipped those again lol
:doge: I love Orchestrator but if you’re selling me business insights and they’re not viewable by my C-levels on a dashboard they ain’t v useful
:doge: ‘Pipeline Inspection lets you create custom filters, watch important opportunities, and see which deals are less likely to close in the current month.’ which are awesome features if you have Performance or Unlimited licenses. Seriously. Every release it’s the same thing. Performance & Unlimited are FAR from the most popular editions, why are you shoving release notes for a product that requires a license with DOUBLE THE DARN COST at the top of your “Sales” section ???
:doge: Service gets a new activatable module "Incident Management which contains new standard objects and I think a Slack integration ? For a Release Note announcing a product this is woefully underdescriptive.
:doge: I won’t even comment anymore lol

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Winter '22 Abridged

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