Spring ’25 Release Notes

• Salesforce •   0
Spring '25 Release Notes

It happen again – over the weekend you got a brand new and shiny version of Salesforce. But what is inside which you can really use and be excited about? This time I can identify even more with the logo as I’m reading the release notes on mountains.

Here is my list of great things I’m looking forward to use/propose to my clients (in bold the super interesting). Obviously you can read the all of those 740+ pages and make your own list to be sure I didn’t skip something super important to you:

  • Cosmos aka SLDS 2 or new Salesforce look and feel is here and you can switch between the existing and new UI. Will you change?
Salesforce Cosmos UI
  • Salesforce Scheduler can be integrate with payment processor to get money when booking an appointment;
  • Salesforce Archive which offloads data off platform but still visualize them as if they are in. Not surprisingly paid extra, but looks super cool!
  • Custom Report Types – that page you don’t see often – has been completely rewamped and looks just great;
  • charts in reports get reordered if you reorder data in the underlying report. I probably need to see it in real life but they claim it makes more sense;
  • list views should render more quickly and supports sorting by multiple columns at once (look for a new icon in top right corner). And the same works for related lists;
  • Log In with Your Email Address might be included later than during the release, but when logging from login.salesforce.com it should give you a list of all instances, where that email has access, and easily log you in;
  • Brand the Welcome Email for Internal Users – all I can add: finally!
  • View All Fields permission is something I should include in this list even though it doesn’t make much sense to me. But might have a huge security impact, luckily it is on per object basis;
  • no idea why we need 300 custom fields on Activities (and why the limit is different to other objects) and I’m afraid the limit for no long text field still applies;
  • zip files support (see Keir’s article);
  • evaluate dynamic formula in apex must be cool, I just cannot think about the practical use-case now;
  • agents can be called from flow or apex which sounds awesome, somehow I’m still scared by the pricing;
  • it is now possible to remove the /s at the end of the URL of Experience Cloud sites;
  • Change History panel in the Experience Builder – finally we have a clue what changes we are publishing;
  • modernized record experience in Aura experience sites – it will be enforced in Summer ’25 and it changes the look and feel!

Field Service

  • Service Appointment Lifecycle component + object to track changes in the scheduling;
Service Appointment Lifecycle
  • Asset Service Lifecycle looks great as well, sadly it is a paid add-on. Actually it contains so many goodies that it might be worth it;
  • Field Service Mobile app won’t work on anything with iOS 16 or Android 9;
  • Data Capture Forms looks super sleak;
  • Geolocation based actions – check-ins, notifications and much more!

Education Cloud

  • Intelligent Degree Planner and the Learner Progress View in the Education cloud look promising;
  • Generational Categories – I have to wonder why simple custom field created by the implementator wasn’t enough and it has to be linked to Fundraising as well if it is mainly about Alumnies;
  • Cross-objects field history for moments when you try to figure what happened when and why, might be useful (but is that only for Industry Clouds?);

Sales

  • Sales Coach, role play, analysis of your pitch looks like something useful, would it be possible to tweak and provide feedback what really worked or not?
Sales Coach on opportunitiy
  • Agentforce SDR looks even more scary with automated emails for reach out, monitoring replies, follow-ups and something more;
  • Account Plans was introduced in Winter, now you can monitor the progress towards them;
  • Sales Action Plans will come in April and complements the planning. And somehow Whitespace Map will arrive as well to show where is untapped potential;
  • Einstein Conversation Insights should be available for free for orgs with less than 10 users (and paid add-on if more), allows you now (sometimes in February) to upload recordings of your conversations and then tell you what happened during the call. Czech language supported (together with 36 other)!
  • Sales Planning, some new feature which is not part of the initial release but should appear later (are they kidding?) Anyway, the quota planning looks good and then you should be able to push them into forecast. Is that the end of uploading the quota via CSV file?
  • say good bye to Einstein Automated Contacts, say hello to Automatic Contact Creation – I can already see the confusion as we have with the Outlook support retirement. Ouch, the naming is hard to make it clear;

Flows

  • Responsive Screens with Automatically Triggered Screen Actions feels like a great way to simplify life for users, the fact that you need to create additional flows, which will perform the action, probably makes so much sense but at the same time – I feel – somehow complicates the whole things. Will I be able to visually „link“ the flows together into some kind of collection?
  • progress indicators needs to be – surprisingly – enabled in the flow properties, it isn’t screen property;
  • flow versions in Flow Builder is such a saver!
  • join Collections with the Transform Element is magical!
  • emails with Attachments in Flow Builder – no way!
  • get records with limit!
  • Flow Approval Processes are here.

The Flow Approval Processes feature is suitable for complex and evolving business needs. It offers flexibility and customization, supporting detailed logging for compliance and audit trails. Approval orchestrations built with Flow Approval Processes support dynamic routing that adapts based on data and business rules. Approval processes built with classic Approval Processes are tied to specific objects with limited support for processes using conditions and rely on the Submit for Approval button. Approval orchestrations provide a more flexible and user-friendly interface, using record triggers or custom buttons in Lightning App Builder

What others found:

Napiš komentář, díky!

What is DevOps (mainly) for admins and consultants – Prague User Group (virtual)

• Salesforce •   0
Trailblazer Community

Join us and Rob Cowell on 27. 2. at 5pm Prague time for out journey to DevOps aka CI/CD.

Get started on your DevOps journey as we show you the tools and techniques for moving to a source-driven development model with Git, with a practical demo of a typical workflow

According to some study 70 % of companies have this topic solved, looking around for real world implementations at small/mid companies I cannot agree with this number. Admins, consultants and developers still struggle with pushing changes across environments or doing changes directly in production. Rolling changes back isn’t usually main requirement, being able to find out what changed when, why and by whom happens more often.

Let’s find out the answers to questions like „Are there real benefits?“, „Is it hard to learn?“, „How much costly it will be?“, „What are metadata?“ and all the other questions you might have.

Sign up now!

Napiš komentář, díky!

Salesforce Data Cloud Architect’s Handbook, Eliot Harper

• Salesforce •   0
Salesforce Data Cloud Architect's Handbook cover

Data Cloud is here and it looks like it won’t go away. But how can we, as an architects, embed it into our solutions? Why and for what purposes?

One way how to find out is Trailhead and potentially the Data Cloud certification, which will give you one side of the view, the ultimate Salesforce view of all data in one system, duplicates which will be unified, search in unstructured data and plenty of other possibilities we weren’t used to.

Over time, Data Cloud is set to become a foundational layer that will facilitat the storage, processing, and activation of data across many organizational functions, including CRM, marketing, web, commerce, loyalty, and analytics.

Eliot’s book is the other view, I would say more cautious, and we will need to find where the future really is.

Pricing

Obviously one important part of ROI calculation and making decision how to use the system is the pricing, which for long time was very unclear. Not sure it is much better now, when the calculator, not run by Salesforce, has been introduced. The Trailhead module might help you as well, but the calculator is probably easier to run (thank you Isaas Shaffer for providing it to the community).

Hard to understand all the possibilities without further studies, but let’s pretend that I’m medium (in my view) sized customer, with 1M records to start with and small part of them will change on daily basis triggering the unification and insights calculation again. I won’t go with all those extra features such as streaming data, which will be more costly, or the unstructured data processing, maybe next step.

Still my calculation is 160 000 credits first year and roughly 50 000 the following years. Combined with the prices I see in my org (1000€ per months per 100 000 credits) it is pretty expensive fun and I bought just the minimum I can. Actually the free Data Cloud comes with 250 000 credits so I’m probably fine and should not worry.

With these prices in mind I would follow Eliot’s recommendation to limit number of data I want to push into Data Cloud and push only data which makes sense for the current business needs. I understand that Agentforce might be clever enough and make something great from all the data I might have in the organization, but right now I would limit to business to specify their actually needs and push only relevant data. And it isn’t just about related data to customers, but also about excluding of inactive customers. Why to unify/harmonize them if they don’t do business with you anymore?

Also segmentation is – according to Eliot – usually the largest area of credit consumption, hence the segments should be designed with a goal to minimize the amount of rows processed. (I didn’t find these credits in the calculator)

Other notes from the book

I did know that the Data Cloud is build on top of AWS, but seeing the list of technologies at one place is incredible – Amazon S3, Parquet files, Elastic Kubernetes Service, Sync, Cloudwatch, AWS Identity Access Management, AWS Auto Scaling, ElastiCache, Simple Queue Service, Elastic MapReduce, Spark, DynamoDB, Relational Database Service.

Think about batch versus real-time data processing, especially if your data are rather changed on daily basis. Also if you have ETL in your landscape, you might want to use that system to tranform your data rather than leaving it to Data Cloud and related credit consumption – I mean transform 100 000 rows uses just 40 credits so who care, but maybe …

Things to keep in mind – categories cannot be change and are inherited from the first DLO mapped to DMO, you need to select immutable data field for the Engagement category otherwise you risk duplicated data, person accounts cannot be used in identity resolution as they contain a mixture of account and contact fields (what??!!), the original intent of „party“ was to provide grouping of individuals (e.g. household, organizational division) but right now it refers either to individual or account. You can trigger segment refresh via flow, this way they can refresh only when really needed and not in regular cycle.

Timing

Timing of the Data Cloud project is crucial and before you will do a few of them you have no clue how to estimate it. Again, according to Eliot, the discovery, planning and design architecture phase typically amoount to 70 % of the whole implementation. Which shows how easy it is to do the „real“ implementation and how important part in the project the experienced solution architect plays.

The simple rule when approaching discovery for a Data Cloud implementation is to start with the end in mind. Begin by understanding the business challenges and use cases.

CDP or not CDP?

Data Cloud arrived after Genii, which arrived after CDP so you might want to say that Data Cloud is kind of CDP, maybe on steroids, which Salesforce doesn’t really like as it is much more. Like what? Eliot’s take is that traditional CDP are specifically used for marketing use while Data Cloud allows you to create segments according to business needs such as:

  • sales team to pre-qualify leads based on their engagement behavior;
  • service teams to prioritize cases based on customer profiles;
  • analysts to group individuals based on demographics, psychographic, behavioral and geographis data;
  • IT teas to understand use across devices;
  • finance team to analyze economic values of specific customer groups;
  • etc.

Looks to me almost like an analytical tool.

Consent model

I’m gilty – it has been introduced in 2018 and extended later on and I never really paid attention to those extra objects as I always felt that while the structure is powerful my customers don’t have such extended needs. And Data Cloud build on this structure to fully support the needs. Actually did you know there are 23 objects and relevant DMOs for it? There are actually 140 DMOs (and counting) in total in the comprehensive model of Data Cloud aka Customer 360 Data Model.

A well architected solution takes time and comes at a cost, but if you think good architecture is expensive, try bad architecture.

That was the final sentence of this great, roughly 140 pages long, book full of information and things for thought. And I would say if you think about implementing Data Cloud you should definitely add it to your library.

Napiš komentář, díky!

Salesforce v Česku s T1A

• Podcast •   0
T1A logo

Společnost T1A jsem poprvé zaregistroval až když tam nastoupil Denis Tomíšek a vůbec mi nebylo jasné, proč šel zrovna tam. A tak jsem si do podcastu pozval Kirilla Dreljuše, který tam pracuje jako CRM Delivery Lead a strávili jsme spolu příjemnou hodinku, ve které mi pověděl o téhle firmě, která má filozofii amerického startupu hodně věcí, o jejich 4 hlavních pilířích, kterými jsou Data Engineering, CRM, Marketing a Process Intelligence.

Zápisky:

  • do Agentforce investovali spoustu časů, není to jenom chatbot na steroidech;
  • jak se liší implementace v CEE, západní Evropě, na blízkém východě a v Americe;
  • jak moc jsou firmy na blízkém východě připraveny investovat do budoucnosti, myslet ve velkém a zkoušet nové věci, jak tam funguje byznys, proč tam mít kancelář je povinností a jak docílit 66 % conversion rate;
  • Financial Cloud ze začátku vypadal jako nějaký okrajový produkt, ale v dnešní době tam mají hodně práce;
  • kancelář nebo home office? Jsou po celém světě a tak jsou lidé zvyklí pracovat remote;
  • o ploché struktuře firmy a jak se velmi rychle se svým nápadem můžete dostat až k CEO.
Listen on Apple Podcasts Listen on Spotify

Napiš komentář, díky!

Taxomat – tvůj pomocník s daněmi

• Finance •   0

Tedy „tvůj“ – pokud obchoduješ s akciemi. A vlastně jsem měl tenhle článek napsat už na konci roku, protože teď už nic neovlivníš a můžeš si jenom spočítat, kolik správně zaplatit.

Já Taxomat objevil loni a začal si s ním hrát. Aplikace má dvě části, z nichž každá funguje v omezeném režimu dokud nezakoupíš předplatné, nicméně i bez předplatného mohou být obě fajn pomocníkem.

Výpočet daňové povinnosti

Pokud obchoduješ na burze, tak při splnění jistých podmínek (tuším zisk větší než 100 000Kč) jsi povinen podat daňové přiznání a výdělek zdanit. Samozřejmě to má spoustu výjimek typu časového testu, možnosti odečíst prodělečné obchody a další, takže na konci roku je ideální čas na organizaci portfolia a pokud jsem realizoval moc zisků tak zavřít i nějaké ztrátové obchody a tak si povinnost minimalizovat.

Taxomat umožňuje nahrát výpisy od brokera – a jejich seznam roste případně můžeš data nahrát v požadovaném formátu – a on sám spočítá jak to vychází. A nejenom to, dokáže ti ukázat rozdíl pokud použiješ jednotný kurz nebo denní kurz, což si můžeš sám vybrat, a rozdíl v metodách může být klidně desítky tisíc. Do toho umožní nákupy a prodeje kombinovat stylem FIFO (první prodej a první nákup dohromady), případně třemi dalšími způsoby tak, abyste minimalizovali daně (opět povolená metoda).

Není tedy nic jednoduššího než ke konci roku (pardot za zpoždění) nahrát výpisy a i v té free variantě se dozvíte, zda daně platit budete nebo máte dost ztráty. A pokud zaplatíte tak to i vygeneruje daňové přiznání včetně zdanění dividend.

Analýza pozic

Druhou funkcionalitou, a tady je free verze opravdu omezená, je analýza pozic. Profit na každé pozici (což asi není nic mimořádného, to asi ukazuje každý broker), simulace daňových dopadů co by se stalo kdybych některou pozici prodal.

Časové testy což je pro mě asi nejlepší věc, protože ukazuje přehledně všechny pozice a kolik zbývá do splnění testu, což samozřejmě mohu pracně vytahovat ze seznamu obchodů nebo se tady prostě kouknout.

Taxomat časové testy

Heat mapa ukazující pozice a jejich velikost, alokace podle zemí a měn (tyhle grafy vypadají po grafické stránce tedy dost tragicky), příjmy z dividend po měsících a hezké srovnání jednotlivých let.

Stojí to za to?

Dělat si daňové přiznání sám tak určitě, takhle bych mohl ušetřit práci daňaři, ale ten už má stejně svůj systém tak to mám spíš pro kontrolu zda to počítá správně. Ty časové testy jsou nicméně velké lákadlo i pro mě, akorát jsem se zatím nedokopal k objednávce.

Ty to ale určitě můžeš mít jinak, tak přemýšlej a případně objednávej.

Napiš komentář, díky!