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 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;
- 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?
- 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:
- SFDC Penguin
- Jen W. Lee
- Rakesh Gupta
- Salesforce Ben – flow, admins, sales