Due to the Coronavirus Salesforce decided to postpone this release by one month, but finally the time for Astro with hearth is here. What great things it brings?
- Split View available in normal apps as well, not only console apps (do you know the difference?);
- Survey got a tons of improvement, as well as in previous release – you can create/update records based on responses, you can use merge fields to customize surveys, link it to end of chat with customer or link to the whole sales cycle and see how it progress (looks like extra paid feature);
- Lightning Scheduler supports anonymised scheduling, so you don’t have to or will not know with whom your appointment is scheduled;
- confirmation of link redirect – now when the link is pointing outside SF you will be prompted whether it is what you want. And you can whitelist target URLs to which you want to be redirected directly;
- good bye to Einstein Voice Assistant as it does’t ever made it from beta and Lightning Dark Mode is temporarily disabled, also customizable forecasting is gone as well as the riginal territory management;
- High Velocity Sales and Sales Cadence got improvements as well – see who talked what, remove prospect from Sales Cadence based on criteria or change it based on email reply plus tons of new statistics and reports;
- product and pricing custom report type available, I have at least one customer who wants to report on these regularly;
- more details in Optimizer – I don’t really use it but maybe I’ll run it at least in a new orgs I get my hands-on to get some food for thought;
- path’s key fields on kanban – path is here with us for a while as well as kanban and now they play nicely together – when you select a record in kanban you can see the key fields there as well without opening the record. And on top of that we got confetti in kanban view as well :-);
- Lightning Sync will not be available for new customer starting in Winter ’21 and Einstein Activity Capture (EAC) is recommended;
- for Pardot customers you can now see Engagement History on opportunities as well;
- Einsten Reply Recommendations for Service Cloud looks like great feature – you create your quick text and based on its usage Einstein will start recommending which one to use;
- Einstein Bots support Facebook Messenger;
- Optimization Insights for FSL are in beta and should tell you whether your changes in scheduling policy had the outcome you hoped for;
- in FSL you can now select appointments from different views and then do what you want to do. Looks interesting, probably someone really needed it, but …;
- shifts, assets availability and more granual control over gantt chart customizations are other features in FSL;
- Service Cloud Voice – brand new product with the power of Amazon Connect includes real-time call transcription – this one looks interesting, where did the Dialer go?;
- Omni-Channel doesn’t consider work load based on open tabs but rather on its status;
- Data Prep (beta) for Einstein Analytics looks super cool and might make the data preparation way easier. Plus the ability to export processed data into Amazon S3 (beta as well);
- crunch more data in Einstein Discovery – the row limit went from 20 millions to 100 millions. And stories versioning;
- multi-level navigation in communities and 2FA for external users;
- preview file rendering will stop using Adobe Flash and SVG will be the way – should solve problem for a lot of people;
Flows
Frankly, they are worth extra section 🙂
- run flow after record is saved and from now on flow is the prefered way of process automation supporting both before and after save (don’t forget the Update element in this type of flow);
- run flow when platform even message is received;
- debug scheduled flow and ability to roll-back changes to records done in debug mode (limitations apply);
- no need to define loop variable or output variable for subflow;
- pass the whole record from quick action or flow embedded on Lightning Page (not just record id);
- run flow in system context without sharing, which ignores basically everything (in previous release it could ignore object and field-level security but not org-wide defauts, sharing rules and role hierarchy;
- lookup fields in flow can search by any field and results are not capped at 5;
- analyze screen flow usage might be pretty interesting, it is standard report now;
Other changes
Dynamic Forms, which are in preview looks pretty awesome as it allows you to dynamically change the fields on form based on conditions. Available on custom objects only and not supported.
Dynamic Actions are the same for actions, which can now be dynamically hidden – no more reasons to separate page layouts based on record types and manage their switching based on record status.
Private Connect to securely connect your Salesforce and Amazon AWS infrastructure through private link.
Automated threat detection in Salesforce Shield.
Lightning Message Service to communicate between Visualforce pages, Aura components and LWC – totally over my head.
Einstein OCR is generally available as well as product detection on retail shelves.
Data Enrichment on Change Data Capture events – that sounds pretty powerful.
What others found?
600 pages later I must say that I really like the flow enhancements and I will probably play with Dynamic Forms and Actions, but that’s about it.
Take a look what others found interesting: