Winter '26 Abridged

The Salesforce Discord Collective Presents:
THE WINTER 26 RELEASE NOTES - ABRIDGED
RELEASENOTES_Redacted as the Summary was not found in the Summary Allowlist

CRITICAL STUFF

• Honestly nothing for most users. Good news !
• Avoid users getting weird warnings, and potential dysfunctions, by updating your Referrer Policy. Because who doesn’t love a good surprise warning popup?
• For the rare customers who use Bring Your Own Channel, Breaking Changes require you to update stuff. All three of you, consider yourselves warned.

GENERAL STUFF

Is big this release because lots of sections were too small to stand alone

• Setup pages get hosted behind the new salesforce-setup domain in Prod orgs starting this release. This shouldn’t be a problem because you’ve had a year to test and review that your IT doesn’t block said domain. (You did test this, right? Right?). As long as you’re at it, you might want to check the Cloudfront URLs as well who took over from Akamai two releases ago
• If your data loader isn’t working after r 2, it’s probably because they deactivated Device-based auth due to all the connected app attacks. Update to the new DL version from github (lol, such a great place for enterprise software - at least Microsoft owns it now so it’s technically enterprise?) and use a User-based auth flow
• Permission Set Licenses get removed automatically after unassigning a related Permset/Group* (* conditions apply. User Access Policies still irrelevant due to shortcomings.)
• The Role and Subordinates thing has either changed or has now been edited to indicate that the Role and Internal Subordinates nomenclature happens even in new orgs as soon as you turn on Experiences. I stupidly thought they were just replacing the old one with this, but no, now you have a nice little cleanup to do before you start your experience cloud project. Neat ! :-(
• External Client Apps get Push and Mobile features, Credential Rotation
• Verification Link Expiration no longer prevents user from setting up password after initial click if it’s re-clicked within 7 days which has happened to me wayyy too often
• They changed the Setup home page to make you more efficient recommend features and tasks for which you totally have licences for .
• List views can now be sorted by multiple columns (GA from Beta), get Keyboard-friendly aids to edit them faster
• Field history tracking gets better compliance support and is available for the User object (beta)
• Metadata Deployments get information about the deployment size, presumably because they’ll try to bill for large deployments in 2035 or something, and also metadata corruption is apparently a thing. If you use Agents the MDAPI name changes so watch out lest you create duplicates.
• On the email side, SFO is definitely retired in 2027, as well as Lightning Sync and Activity360 Reporting/Metrics/etc. TL;DR "use EAC", which gets potential Contact/Lead suggestion from emails and a threaded view which looks nice but isn’t available (Soon™). On that note, Microsoft is retiring EWS, so if you’re using EWS to sync, you need to migrate to Graph API. The year is 2027 and we’re still figuring out email sync.
• Experience Cloud LWR sites can be upgraded to Enhanced LWR which sadly removes the /s from the URL, so you won’t be able to know by URL only if a site’s on SF. Press S to pay respects.
• Forecasting on Opportunity Line Item Splits is now possible if you have a ServiceDate on the OLIS, and Consumption Forecasting now doesn’t force a Gregorian calendar
• Reports on Case Team Member can now leverage Roles so you can see why people interact on cases.
• Cases get Rich Text Comments which I’m sure will get gutted over the years as they realize people abuse images (can’t wait for the Comic Sans epidemic), and Time to Next Milestone in List Views which is pretty great.
• SLA Management replaces Entitlement Management with a new Setup which is good because Entitlements sucked
• Chat gets in-chat video support, and markdown support, probably linked to more filetype support
• Omnichannel gets sorting directly in the Work Attribution box, and abandoned Work Items reporting to see when users got too frustrated and quit
• Dashboards get localized Titles and Descriptions, reference values display, and configuration based on Report Settings for tables. There’s also a setting to disable formulas in exported reports to avoid “unintended code execution”… from the very complex formulas that are allowed in Salesforce… in your org… in your excel. Yes, someone tried to inject code via report formulas. No, we’re not surprised either.
• Tableau Next still is a thing that is seeing so many updates that it’s obviously still “work in progress”
• Time-based Workflows Now called Time-Based Automation, RIP reference to outdated technology.
• RIP in pieces, Optimizer. One thing where GenAI could have actually said “yeah this is important to fix or not” and instead, it got killed because “the app’s original purpose was to help migration to LEX”, which is horseshit as it mostly reported on performance and best practice. Pour one out for our fallen homie.

MARKETING

• Marketing Cloud Next gets mobile notifications, better template and contentblock management, better landing page configuration, Sandbox support (lol I can’t believe this is a release note instead of just “yeah it’s the minimum acceptable feature” - imagine launching without sandbox support and calling it enterprise software), better Identity Resolution, etc. If this seems like a lot, it’s because it’s brand new and as such getting all the love. We’ll see in roughly 2 years whether it’s actually become something great, or joined the list of stale-ass stuff that SF has forgotten like Pipeline Inspection, Einstein Automated Contacts, their promise that Agentforce uses anonymized data, or CPQ.
• Marketing Cloud Engagement (ex-ExactTarget) gets a slew of minor but powerful updates which seem to indicate product involvement and upkeep, meaning that contrary to CPQ, you’re not scheduled for the thousand cuts yet.

FLOWS

• Quick reminder that you really should set up via Permission Set who can run your Flows. Yes, we know you haven’t done this yet. No, we won’t stop nagging you about it.
• Transaction Control means you can now force new transactions for callouts (at the cost of no more debugging tools - a small price to pay for… checks notes …being able to make callouts). Also default behavior from previous state has changed, so test all ya flows tyvm.
• You can now Compare Versions of Flows, bringing an easy way to debug why your “minor change” broke prod without having to stare at each element while your manager breathes down your neck asking “is it fixed yet?”
• Debug continues to evolve with some changes like the positioning of the window needing adaptation, but makes for a more coherent viewing in general.
• Flow Approvals now also support Debug, have a polling feature to get triggered from external systems, have more tolerant assignee picker, support groups and queues as firstapprovers
• The Data Cloud Transformation modules comes to normal Flows to map data to Actions
• The SendEmail component groups the collection and single variable inputs into a single input
• Flow Approvals get better Send for Approval Action
• Visually, the Resource Menu has changed, presumably to have a more unified experience with the new Debug modules, and focused items are now highlighted in Blue. You can also preview Flows with Branding sets and style text better than before, also images from static resources for beauty reasons
• If you didn’t like Assigning variables to sObject variables before create, you can now reference the Create Records as a sObject variable after it has run which will lead to errors if you don’t factor that in while updating API versions. Update your API versions, you cowards!
• The DOGE from last release now becomes useful - if you get with related objects you can now use those related objects to do nested FOR loops without extra GETs which was previously hard to do.
• You can now create LEX pages for Flow Objects just like for other objects, including components such as the Orchestration one - hope specific components for stuff that should be modular won’t become a habit.
• Event-triggered Flows now allow you to trigger when a File is attached to a Record
• Persistent Logging means “shove your logs into Data Cloud so you can review them more easily” - I’m supposing this is “free because Foundations”, but not really free.

FIELD SERVICE

• Scheduling and Optimization gets a huge upgrade with dynamic scaling solving high-complexity schedules previously being super annoying, better travel-time management when breaks are factored in
• Visual Remote Assistant now supports four guests in a single call because what we needed was another slack replacement and timestamps for notes
• One LLM usage I actually like, Data Capture uses LLMs to have Agents dictate meeting notes and fill fields automatically

COMMERCE

• Unified Template covers both B2B and B2C stores on a single codebase. I’m assuming this is why we get parameter-based storefronts which sound cool but are also a tad old.
• Localized Markets can now be done for B2B Internal Users as well as guests, and Localized Email Templates can be dynamically selected based on store locale. Also Localisation doesn’t require you to copy paste the source text into the Source Language translation file anymore.
• “We have a GitHub with ready-to-use component templates” was an easier title than this. Did the writer get paid by the word?
• You can now refund people to a different payment method than the original
• If you edited your Cancel Item flow previously, you might want to take this new update allowing easier cancellation of eligible items
• Partial SKU Search allows people to find subgroups of products faster if you use logical grouping by SKU.
• You can now leverage BACS, BECS, SEPA, and ACH via the Commerce API

DEVELOPMENT

• CA cert lifetime changes impact Salesforce a bit (in 2027 for real impact) - here’s to hoping this means we get CLI access to certs and rotations, or even letsencrypt support. (Narrator: They did not get letsencrypt support)
• Local Dev gets better for single components and updates on save for LWR sites
• If you haven’t migrated to SLDSv2 yet, the SLDS Linter which you can install from here helps you find issues in your code and uplift your repo to v2. The SLD Validator will help you ensure you do good quality components from VSCode directly. (now GA, and yes I just copypasted the last release because I didn’t feel like rewriting this). Also DarkMOde and density-aware components for SLDSV2, also usable in VF
• A new Tooling API Endpoint allows Test (Apex and Flow) Execution and Retrieval
• Abstract and Override methods cannot be used in private access modifiers anymore
• I’m psyched but surprised SF is letting this out the door what with the potential for abuse, but you can create LWCs that leverage Local Actions (browser stuff) and use those in Screen Flows. Can’t wait to see what creative chaos the community unleashes with this one.
• Speaking of Flows, if you do Invocable Actions, the new Extension Metadata Type allows you to configure input order, group and visibility so your custom stuff looks good to Users. Also using Where Actions are Used allows you to find your custom actions in Flows across the org.
• Lightning Out 2.0 allows you to put LWCs and Flows in random websites ! Great stuff or DoA like Lightning Out 1 ? We’ll see !
• A good thing about AI is that it finally forced Salesforce to care about structured Comments in Code which leads to this new standard so Agentforce can hallucinate good code based on your human-generated slop ;)
• External Services get higher limits, image/file support, made possible by this change in how CD manipulation is handled in APEX, but document upload size is still only 16MB.
• For Flows, you can now add APEX-Defined Collections to DataTables. You already could in LWCs, but now it’s Flow-compatible.

DATA CLOUD

• You can get Commerce Data even if from another org and segment it into its own data space
• Using a "DevOps Data Kit" ™ you can migrate Data Cloud config from Sandbox to Prod which is also doable via CLI (also using said data kit)

AGENTFORCE

• You can Expose AuraEnabled methods to Agents (depending on a your licensing scheme, requires some mulesoft api thing, hallucinations not guaranteed)
• Agents hallucinating URLs will now send URL REDACTED to customers if you set up the URL allowlists, truly an experience that we all aim to deliver to our prized customers.
• Agents can now use custom display cards that SF calls Lightning Types so information looks better on screen.
• To help you debug an Agent, turning on Session Tracing stores everything from engine decisions to actions in Data Cloud for review. Same stuff for RAG Tracking to see how content is used.
• After getting SF Support to turn it on, you can use the Generative KA action to generate AI slop on demand within a Chat. Woooo.
• Salesforce gives you more flexibility into where Models are run and which models you run
• Flow Agentforce decisions are… not something I hate. I think it’s great for things where criticality is low-to-medium and a human will benefit from even data that is statistically not perfect all the time. Structured Outputs also look nice, forcing Agentforce to answer into pre-configured objects in Flow.
• For Service, Agentforce looks for similar cases via Semantic Search, and quotes Knowledge Articles, will also Ground itself in Chatter (and will bug out if you don’t assign a new permission set because enterprise users LOVE instability)
• Early Adopter’s curse: Article Answers requires migration to Generative Knowledge Answers before Dec. 31st, otherwise no worky. As said in Deployments, the API name of agent stuff changes as well so you can update your repos to prevent chaos.
• Email handling Agents can now Reply All

DOGELAND

• :doge: Einstein Next Generation can create draft flows that suck less, because the previous iteration was ass.
• :doge: Spaghett
• :doge: Why don’t you just strip ZWSP
• :doge: If the case is Closed, our Agent can Close it for you ! At least they found a way to make LLMs deterministic.

This abridged version was graciously written up by the SF Discord

We have a nice wiki: https://wiki.sfxd.org/

And a LinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sfxd/

Join the ~18000 members in the most active chat-based community around Salesforce these parts of the web at http://join.sfxd.org/