Winter '23 Abridged

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The Salesforce Discord Collective Presents:
THE WINTER 23 RELEASE NOTES - ABRIDGED
This post is proudly sponsored by no one at all. (@SFXD_BOT)

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CRITICAL STUFF

• If you ignored LWC syntax errors or Template Warnings you now gotta fix em otherwise you’ll get runtime errors. Same if you DARED use Design Tokens that aren’t GA, HOW DARE YOU BE FORWARD FACING ?
• Enhanced Domains change your URLs, and New Events allow you to see if the old URLs are still referenced anywhere. Your objective is for that second list to hit 0.

GENERAL STUFF

• Permission Sets can now contain FLS on field creation and get a new UI, bringing the day they replace Profiles ever closer.
• Tasks get a to-do list ✓
• Custom Address fields are now GA ! Study why they can’t be used in your organisation anyway today
• Dynamic Forms now work on Account, Person Account, Contact, and Opportunity. It’s great news due to the underlying complexity of making it work. It’s also far from perfect due to numerous styling issues (you’ll see if you put them on a page) and some functional issues like button addition and mass modification. As-is my recommendation is “use when necessary, wait for stability if you can instead”.
• Picklists continue getting mass edition love with Inactive Picklist Mass Deletion. Why they chose to name the button “delete unused values” instead of “inactive”, only Benioff knows.
• You can now clone Lightning Apps meaning if you use a lot of components on a page and you need to make a variation thereof for other people you now can.
• Global Value Set API Names now get appended with __gvs to avoid conflicts with other stuff removed from release
  
• If you ever were surprised with Sandboxes behaving weirdly, know that you can now see if your sandbox is a pre-release one in the Setup.
• Territories now handle Leads but still kinda suck
• Event Releases from last release are now GA and you can now stream to AWS Eventbridge (but those events can’t be queried)
• In Spring 22, Salesforce announced "Case Swarming in Slack", which seems to be a Skill-based approach to Case Resolution, kind of like Omnichannel, but internally. In Winter 23 they now release the concept fully with no explanation whatsoever of how it works, so here’s a blog from July telling you what it’s supposed to do and an internal example from last November to go a bit further.
• Last Release I talked about something called Messaging for In App or Web. Seems this is the future of LiveAgent ? Still lots of movement on that SKU again, updates which are pretty useful and includes wait times (also for omni-channel, that one) search, attachments, jump to message, and tab header integration. If I was doing a LiveAgent implementation now I’d probably wait a bit.
• Einstein Bot Learning Map looks like a nice way to get on board Bots.

TOOLS

• DevOps Center is now live and Beta. Install Guide Here, issues here. It’s not complete yet, so don’t go crazy on your production for now.
• Code Builder is Live. This is useful for Devs, but also for technically-inclined Admins. Give feedback here, view documentation here, pray with us that the hourly limit doesn’t make it to production here
• The Data Loader now has its own download page, don’t look for it in Setup.
• A new Permission Set assistant, official but hosted on appexchange, makes perms management easier.

REPORTING

• Reports get some love both in function and UI, even on mobile. Slack integration also looks nice.
• Forecasting now allows filters on custom fields and custom calculated columns as well as pretty colors
• CRM Analytics (ye ole tool of golden renamings) get a slew of QoL upgrades but mostly get impressive snowflake reporting updates

FLOWS

• New In and Not In operators allow stuff like SELECT Id FROM Contact WHERE Id IN AccountList which is a very, VERY nice upgrade (which is a bit half baked, you can only do IN text collections, not records). But also adds complexity.
• Standard Data Table and Multi-Lookup Selection Components 🎉
• The Formula Builder has stopped sucking, and you can use ISCLONE in Record Triggered Flows.
• You can Cut and Paste elements and view Go To connections easily now
• Flows take a leaf out of Process Builder’s book and allow updates to records related to the Origin in the Update Component. How does this impact performance ?
• Some UI Updates That Look Nice
• Testing is now GA, also adds testing for Scheduled Paths, more information here. Mandatory Tests when ?

DEVELOPMENT

• Auth-related: SAML Version Upgrade might break existing SSO. Review Release Update. Also in Auth world, Named Credentials get a nice upgrade.
• Queries are more powerful and return more data, stored longer
• Lightning Web Security is now default for now orgs. LWS is the forward-facing replacement for Lightning Locker, applicable only to LWC, and… supports iframes???. Comparison Here. LWS also distorts Javascript APIs that it deems insecure which you can find in the Distortion Viewer with its corrected and more secure according to our overlords distorted behavior.
• As called in the last release notes, mixed Shadow DOM is now here, and light DOM also allows you integrate with ad trackers third party sites better. Documentation about DOMs here.
• Modal Component provides user-interaction-mandatory pop-up capabilities.
• You can Call Flows from LWC using a standard component
• APEX user-mode gets updated with more operations.
• Assertions get WAY better with System.Assert class by type
• A security hole is getting plugged if you used Global Constructors in Managed Packages
• You can now access the standard Email Composer via LWC

EXPERIENCES

• LWR Sites (so Build Your Own and Microsites) get Partial Deployments thanks to Digital Experience Metadata now being changeset-able. This may be a trend for other Experiences (or could be a sign that most Experiences will migrate to LWR at some point?). LWR also gets easy Download links for Content, Document, and Attachments and Google Analytics 4
  
• You can iFrame your Experience and whitelist the external domain now.

B2B and B2B2C Commerce

• You can add a store to an existing Experience
• They’re making promotions less of pain but you still have no real way to test a promotion before shipping it live lmao
• Languages in B2C stores pretty much require you to have licenses for it to work, and once again lack any sort of testing to ensure you don’t mess up translated content in 25 languages.

DOGELAND

• :doge: If you're going to ignore what your customers want despite already curating the list of stuff you're offering, maaaaaybe don't ask for our opinion.
• :doge: The amount of Release Updates that get shelved or completely reworked, and half-baked “products”, over the past releases is too darn high. This is an ENTERPRISE-FOCUSED COMPANY you should be targeting stability for crying out loud. Like let's speak about the Flow tests, it's a good feature but if it was Brioche I wouldn't be eating it, it's RAW. Checkbox fields are still buggy, can't add related test data, can't run with apex tests/suites, aren't surfaced anywhere besides in the flow builder for its flow...
• :doge: More fun than bad but the Slack ‘CRM Analytics for Slack’ app "isn’t just for CRM Analytics anymore.", which yields a situation where a function named after a license named after an acquired software (Tableau) now has no bearing on the original software… or license. I’m sure it’ll get renamed to ‘Analytics Engagement’ or ‘Chat Analytics Embedded’ or maybe ‘Quip’ IDK
• :doge: Salesforce Scheduler still doesn’t say it’s paid or not part of Core. Data Pipelines either, and they put Sales Cadences in “Core Sales Features” :chefskiss:
• :doge: CMS becomes "enhanced"… and still seems to be Confluence 10 years ago. I have no idea who the target audience for this is.
• :doge: The Swarm thing is somewhat insane in how obscure it is. Maybe actually tell us how your thing works and what it’s meant for ?

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