Summer ’21 Release Notes

Salesforce Summer '21 Release Logo

It is the time of the year here again, when we get a new Salesforce release. I nick named this one as Release of Pilots, which is great and not so great at the same time. I really like that we know about all those cool pilots going on, I don’t really like the feeling that on those 612 pages of release notes it feels like half of them are pilots.

But don’t worry, I still found a lot of interesting things:

  • Einstein Search is generally available, which means it isn’t really a new feature, but reminds me I should really offer it to clients;
  • Page Performance analysis can analyse custom components and offer guidance how to improve them;
  • dependent picklists can have default values;
  • Customer Community licence now have access to tasks;
  • Loyalty Management add Czech as end-user language (pretty cool right that this $30 000/year product now supports even our language);
  • custom report type on Email Messages which can show you inbound/outbound numbers, effectivity of emails (open?) but it doesn’t work for list emails;
  • native LinkedIn integration, still paid from LI side, but no need to install external app. Plus Sales Cadence now supports LinkedIn in terms of sending messages;
  • Lead Scoring (paid add-on) now supports segments to better qualify your leads;
  • integration with Microsoft Teams is GA (will not be available from day 1) – you can mention records in Teams, inline edit them or post from Chatter to Teams.
Microsoft Teams and Salesforce Integration
  • CMS now supports scheduled publishing and un-publishing;
  • Enhanced My Domain doesn’t sounds like a big deal, but I really like the list of domains so you know what to expect;
  • My Domain will be mandatory from Winter ’22 – they wanted to do this a few year ago, finally looks like the time is here, need to enable those a few orgs which still didn’t do it;
  • ability to compare versions of Knowledge Base articles;
  • ability to change email of Guest User plus something about their licence, need to find more to fully understand it.

If your site’s guest users have the standard guest user license, update them to the provisioned guest user license, which gets updated automatically.
Updating the guest user license can impact which permissions the users receive. We recommend testing in a sandbox before updating production.

  • Data Pipeline (paid product) are Salesforce native ETL. At the same time here is a new feature for Tableau CRM which allows you to push data back to Salesforce objects, which looks like something with very similar feature set;
Salesforce Data Pipeline
  • Recipies versioning (Tableau CRM);
  • pivoting, clustering and time series
  • flow has some great new feature which looks like small things but brings nice benefits – ability to use IsChanged, IsNew and PriorValue in record-triggered flows, debug record-triggered and paused flows, additionally sort & limit collections, add record fields directly to screen and simplify the design a bit. Potentially big things is „Execute Record Update elements in bulk after loops for all Flow trigger types„, because if I read it right we don’t have to worry about putting records into collection in a loop and update after, because Salesforce will do it for us (just need to update API version to 52).
Debug paused flows

Betas

  • In-App Guidance offers targeted prompts – still did’t play with it but now I really should and provide documentation this way?
  • inline editing in reports (you need to contact support to enable it), support only some types of fields and one by one edit, but still nice extra;
  • restriction rules should solve a big challenge with Contracts & Tasks visibility, still strange we need to go with new feature on top of standard sharing instead of changing that;
  • expiration on Permission Sets, which can be valid longer than just for a session – specify date when the user will lose them and don’t worry about it;
  • Salesforce Functions – every developer waiting for this one, right? It will open after Summer will go live, you can subscribe to be notified;
  • Omni-Channel flow, which is a flow handling which agent will get which request.

Interesting Pilots

  • Platform Events with Channels to limit number of events your client has to process;
  • sending list emails directly from Gmail/Outlook;
  • Einstein Discovery supports external models (Python, TensorFlow);
  • Flow Orchestrator which allows you to create multi-step processes, they say that in the future this might also replace approval processes.
Flow Orchestrator

Others

There are a few other articles you might like:

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