Winter '25 Abridged

The Salesforce Discord Collective Presents:
THE WINTER 25 RELEASE NOTES - ABRIDGED
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CRITICAL STUFF

Breaking MDAPI Change that breaks anything targeting Roles and Subordinates
Contact your AE to get Salesforce Foundations features activated for free. This bring Sales and Service licences a bit closer together in Core, and also give you Data Cloud, Commerce, and Marketing functions. Well-suited to initial discovery of features.

HYPED STUFF

Data Cloud, the software formerly known as CDP continues its quest to plug in to everything and is probably the fastest-evolving cloud ATM. If you want a TL;DR Salesforce Data Cloud is priorly Salesforce Customer Data Platform, a Data Warehouse for unstructured data — the reason it’s become so big is that previously Genie was the tool to make unstructured data structured, but with the current focus on AI solutions (which they called back in their CDP Marketing), they realized they could NOT have to structure said data and just make it exploitable, which is what they’re selling. In reality the biggest advantage for Companies (IMO) now is NLP data entry and query, because that means that people can easily fill records and access data, tasks that non-IT folk find boorish. Example with Report Formulas that were always a bit arcane, but the new AI Formula Builder will help new users get used to the syntax. The example they give as a usecase is as woefully limited as the actual assistant’s success in generating complex formulas as of yet. (because HYPe)
Einstein Copilot is now Agentforce with a gazillion of the hype and… most of the same features. The major structural change is the grouping within Topics which can contain Actions. So in short you get a Natural Language Processing module that identifies Topics in which it can leverage Actions that you describe, removing unwanted behavior via Guardrails. You can setup a quick one via this Trailhead. If you read between the lines you still need to surface the data it needs properly, and to control the actions it takes, so you can do so securely - but it is a very nice front-end for stuff. Also Salesforce is working on hosting its own backend for all this, called Atlas.
If you didn’t understand that AI is a VERY BIG DEAL, SF is giving you free AI training and certifications

GENERAL STUFF

Highlights Panel gets updated, finally can contain 12 fields, doesn’t rely on outdated Compact Layouts, also available -on mobile.
We’re back in 2004 with Formulas to do icons except now you can style the entire field, for Dynamic Fields-supported Objects, which is lovely but I am sure will also be abused and battered in less than a month (after release, which is in November for some reason)
You can now treat Person Accounts like Contacts in Reporting
Sales Cloud gets Opportunity Splits by Territories with Associated Forecasts, and there’s new Dashboard data security settings if you use Territories as well as a new shiny custom dashboard for Account plans which is basically just a well setup Sales homepage with a few custom components.
If you’re using Capture Leads from LinkedIn, it will break without action from your part despite it being a “Release update”
Data Privacy Center is now Platform native instead of a Managed Package, available in specific Regions it seems to be free has been edited and isn't free and allows previewing impact data rules which allow masking, deleting, or retaining data
DevOps Center is now available for Bitbucket Cloud which means I have to look into it seriously, but the feedback I’ve heard has been more than bad, so I am not looking forward to this.

Service

If you were bad at building Dashboards, Einstein can create a Service one for you. Data in Release Note presumably taken directly from the Salesforce T1 stats.
Enhanced Bots now recognize Intents even on the first message, which is nice but weird that this wasn’t the case before. They also get new components which are all async - meaning the customer can answer later. Async components didn’t exist before. Bots also get automatic translation for components (setup required). Something called strict recognition allows less CPU spent processing bad data, but what about the impact on accuracy ?
Messaging for In App and Web gets… a full-fledged API so you can do full-custom Chat implementations, Mobile App Full Integration, Dev Edition Support and Standard Events for better debugging, UX Improvements also for Setup and maintenance, better error handling, proper Post-Chat Surveys… and my personal favourite, Bring Your Own Channel, which means you can now integrate third parties yourself into Omnichannel and Salesforce Support, or build your own from scratch if you feel like it. INSANE levels of flexibility, and when you compare with LiveAgent 5 years ago… just wow.
Omnichannel on Mobile allows users to be spammed with work even in the train :D

ADMINISTRATION

In Permissions world, the User Access Summary allows you to see how they have access (or don’t) to a field, and Object, or a Permission. Very Powerful, very sleek. The Object-centric side of this same view also exists - so you can view by User or by Object. The added part of firing Events for Perm changes is nice but doesn’t seem finished (plus you need Event Monitoring to enjoy it, which is still Shield if I remember). The Permission Groups Management with better inbuilt documentation via Description field seems very powerful with nested Public Groups - this might be a very good way to handle specific permission structures, seeing as UAPs can be based on Groups.
You can now mass edit Users in List View
Custom Report Types get brought to Lightning with a new fancy-pants editor and list views

FLOWS

The new Action Button is greatly helpful in streamlining how people engage with multi-step processes (and makes designing Subflows even more useful).
You can now replace your Loop/Assign combos with Transform which now applies to standard data types, meaning you can use it to transform one list of Objects to another, or extract a list from a collection, or summarize values directly in-memory.
Quick Reminder that you have one year to Add necessary Run Flows permissions to Users otherwise they can’t run em anymore. Also, if you use the NavigateEverywhere UnofficialSF thing, this release update probably impacts you.
The Create element now supports Upsert via IDs, External IDs, or… standard fields ??? They also need to update the “make sure that ID is blank” bit. Powerful, only turned on via a switch, easily revertable - good update.
The famously-repeated Repeater Component can now be used to Update Collections, an upgrade from its previous state of only allowing creations.
Disabling Fields on Screens is now possible through a Property of the Field which means that you can set it in the Flow, or from a Field/Permission value, which means that if a Field is disabled and it shouldn’t, you now need to check FLS, OLS, Lex Page settings, and then the Flow, if you have a Flow in a Dynamic LEX Page on an Object. Powerful, but spaghett.
On the Display side, the new Error Pane is lik the old errors and warnings, but better displayed, and LWCs now display API Name and Label to recognize them better, and Data Table Single Row Selection now uses Checkboxes which has minor functional impact.
Flow has resurrected Clippy with helpful tips to avoid doing bad design
You can now search for Children Resources directly in the resource picker which is one of my favourites this release. Variable management is now also easier both in creation and update

DEVELOPMENT

RESURECTION ! Ye Olde LWC Local Dev is back in a new and improved form: Real Time Preview
BREAKING: The LWC API v62 brings breaking changes on styles and eslint rules. DOM structure
also has breaking changes, as do Dynamic SOQL Error Messages, the way you can request Sandbox Refreshes via the Tooling API also has a breaking change regarding the newly required ActivationUserGroupId field which points to a Group, and the CORS whitelist applying to api.salesforce.com can also be breaking if you abused this in the past.
Instanced URL (like https://eu1.salesforce.com) stop working on Oct. 21th, update your references if you didn’t do so the gazillion times this was announced. Help is available directly in setup
Apex Exceptions now fire events which are part of a Free Tier of Event Monitoring so you can track those properly instead of relying on emails. They also fire on more stuff including AuraEnabled, RestResource and InvocableAction
You can now serve 1MB JS files in your LWC components. I look forward to the first org I open which loads a 1GB page (unless they full do Server Side Rendering everywhere which could then be pretty awesome for complex logique handling)
LWS automatic is "indefinitely postponed" due to existing high-customization customers. You can still activate it manually, and for once I would not bet that it means it will be left by the wayside.
You can temporarily turn Distortions on and off via the Debug mode. Forgot wtf those are ? TL;DR “Creates Synthetic Namespaces so that malicious code can’t access data from other components”. Turning them off makes reading the outputs of the components easier.
You can now do LWCs with typescript instead of vanilla JS. There’s a few considerations but it’ll make coding LWCs easier for most devs.
LWR gets polymorphic Pages with a Builder to add a Data Provider, a path to upgrade LWR to Enhanced LWR and more design options in the Builder as well as the file upload component (that one’s pretty huge for adoption) and whitelisting Clickjack protection.
A new tool allows you to migrate from a Connected App to an External App for your local devs, which allows you to see oAuth Usage. External Apps can also be created via the App Manager like Connected Apps could be, and can now be used to package oAuth Custom Scopes, as well as setting the start URL. Combined with the possibility of Making them visible in the App Launcher this means that you can now make custom third-party redirects from Salesforce that authentify you. Nice. Note that to get Consumer Credentials you need to Change to Connect REST from MDAPI
SSO Gets a huge upgrade with dynamic Authentication Parameters which get passed to the Provider. TL;DR ‘no more static definition of parameters that the external provider expects’. New Token Exchange UI so you don’t have to do MDAPI stuff to get tokens either. Awesome. Quick reminder that you also need to Migrate to Multiple Configuration SAML Framework, new tool to verify the integrations can help you debug.
If you already use headless Identity for your custom apps, note that changes in those endpoints try to follow the currently-emerging global (not just salesforce) standard for headless identity. Or said differently "powerful but prone to changes". (aka unstable)
A new /Services/oauth2/revoke endpoint allows you to deactivate individual JWT tokens instead of revoking all the ones in your Org
List Views change backend tech which has minor UI impact but some nice advantages even for developers (even if I find weird to create List Views via Wire, I’d have expected Tooling built eh)

OTHER CLOUDS

Commerce gets a Product Visibility Troubleshooter in the Commerce App, Automated Order Confirmation Emails, and improve user navigation through a mini cart and endless product scrolling. They also open cheaper licenses as well as proper high res image handling. They also decided to [reinvent the wheel] by having yet another builder to manage branding and reinvent related lists idk as well as a custom Path implementation much wow.
If you’re still paying for CPQ, ex-Steelbrick, really - look into changing to Revenue Cloud instead. It’s still only two-thirds baked though.
FSC Migrates from Managed Package to Core, but the reference link died this week for some reason. Plz Halp.
Marketing Cloud sees a new Marketing Cloud Advanced release which comes complement Growth which itself gets A/B Testing and Live Insights. If I had to guess, I’d say that Data Cloud-based systems will eventually be the on-platform rewrite of the Old Exact Target. Or TL;DR “keep eyes on this if you’re using Marketing”.

DOGELAND

:doge: We “Increased” the inbound email limit Except it was a soft limit previously where emails would actually still get processed, and now exceeding it results in soft bounces.
:doge: Email Addresses must now comply with RFC standards and as such require quotation of the local-part in edge-cases where otherwise invalid characters exist. The “Latest RFC standards” is RFC5322 section 3.2.4. from 2008 lmao why is actually just reinforcing that double dots were invalid as early as 2004 in RFC3696 but it’s ok they’re also enforcing RC7208 from 2015 so at least there’s minor improvement in delays, 10 years or less :kek:
:doge: Export from Data Cloud-connected CRM Analytics Assets (Beta)… Data Cloud > Supposedly stores millions of rows of unstructured data and helps you map it to existing structures > Makes exports available > 32 MB CSV > Assuming an export of 20 fields of which a single one is 255 chars and the others are roughly 50 chars, you get roughly 1,226 characters per row, so… 28 000 rows as an export. Much data. Such wow. Very report.
:doge: Purchase Own, release standalone Archive… Probably kill it in under a year I guess.? Goodbye Backup Semi-Features
:doge: They added a feature to multipicklists. As long as that feature isn’t “Removed Multipicklists for pressing ceremonial reasons” I’m not interested.
:doge: I’d love to see how this looks by 2030
:doge: Yo we know this is bad practice and we wanna fix it but too many of y’all decided to jump the gun and do stupid stuff so we’ll just leave it up to you to activate this at some point IDK, same here but with a continuously-delayed update but at least it’s not 6 years old like this one
:doge: mwhid —> X
:doge: SLA targets per Queue Assignment in Omnichannel ! **(paid offering, requires Service Intelligence because it has to do with Einstein… oh. wait. it doesn’t ? well, more money for Marc.)
:doge: A new Mobile App is basically just a preconfigured SF App for Sales People, which, great, but the standard app does that well enough? And the Administrator also gets a new sales setup menu which gets its own Product name for some reason ? and Service gets a “Journey” of the same thing but different
:doge: Use an LLM to rewrite your grantee applications for board approval, because we know that AI totally understands the equilty issues the grant application is probably about!

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Winter '25 Abridged

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