While Salesforce claims that the spring is here (or will be here next week), I really hope, when looking outside of the window, that it will wait a bit longer. Right now I crave the snow so much.
Jokes aside, the Spring ’23 release is here and we should take a look what new and great features in brings. If nothing else, the logo is super cute this time.
The most crucial and visible change for all clients will be the auto enablement of MFA, which will be rolled out in phases during 2023 but at first you will still be able to disable it again. This is not relevant for SSO users and I already covered the MFA tooling previously.
Searchable fields are in beta, but it looks like we will be able to easily specify, per profile (what about permission sets?), which fields should be searchable for those users. Will see.
In reports we will have a new $USER variable which we can use for filtering. No more formula fields to calculate whether the running user is the one I want based on the record. (I don’t believe this example is the best, but based on Created By makes more sense)
Admins can also know better to which reports and dashboards are user subscribed (just open a new Subscriptions Report) and user can subscribe to even more reports! (15 now, was 7 before, which I didn’t even notice and always thought it was 5)
Final improvement of reports – when creating a new one you can filter by fields you need on it. Actually one more – you can add text and graphics to dashboard (beta feature) which sounds promising and brings new possibilites.
New template for Lightning Pages – Pinned Right Sidebar (3 regions) which might be super handy.
Also the „Apply and Automate Mass Access with User Access Policies (Beta)“ looks super cool and might simplify admins lives by automatically applying the right permissions sets, licences, groups, etc. based on set criterias.
Czechia has been updated – don’t look for Czech Republic anymore in the country picklist. Similar for a few more, Türkiye is probably the most interesting with all its non-English characters. (applies only for new orgs, in existing you need to change it manually)
Looks like Flow and External Services are the way to go in even more occasions, probably need to look into more details next time I need to do an integration.
Track field history for Activities (finally, even though I probably never needed it), but supports only 6 fields (compared to 20 on other objects). Better than nothing.
Plenty of developers related improvements I have absolutely no clue what they means. I really hope that means they are super low-level. The user modes on database operations look interesting, even though I know we should check before I probably never had a strong use case to do that.
DataWeave will be probably huge. I saw so many code with XML transformations, CSV parsing, etc. that this looks like blessing. „enforcing the same heap and CPU limits on the executing code“ is a bit disappointment, but for everything else we have the Salesforce Functions.
Dynamically Pass Bind Variables to a SOQL Query looks like a way how to have just one variable „merging“ all the other parameters for SOQL query into one. Might probably save some lines of code.
Do you use Flow on Experience Site with guest users? It most likely will stop working and you need to give access to the guest user for each flow separately.
Automotive Cloud is here, which isn’t that interesting, but some features there are. Like Contact to Contact Relationships, something similar exists in NPSP, Financial Cloud, … I wonder when they will make it part of the Core and cut from all those products. Would make so much sense.
Absolutely breaking – the activities buttons are being changed and new features added – list of emails or phone numbers directly in the icon. Users can still switch it back to the old design, but this is the new default from now on.
605 pages later this was about all which catched my attention. Plenty of clouds I didn’t know much about and don’t plan to find more, I finally realised I won’t be able to cover the full width of the platform. But their changes takes maybe even more than half of those pages, which kind of signals how many new features we really got. And a lot of them in beta. A bit sad I would say.
Surprisingly no enhancements to Genii.
