“You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.” - Jon Kabat Zinn
Change is unrelenting, change will always come, and learning to embrace and navigate that change is what brings us joy. Do you know what else brings us joy? Salesforce’s contribution to peaceful mindfulness: the Winter ‘23 Release Notes! In this season of giving, Salesforce has decided to give us features in abundance. Let’s get right to it, we’re going to cover some changes coming to the big main clouds and some features being provided to our builders!
Sales
Collaborative Forecasts - Understanding what your expectations are in regard to a deal is an extremely important undertaking for any sales-oriented business. This information informs your teams of where to spend their time and informs the leadership in an organization of where to invest in helping grow the business. Now Salesforce is trying to make finding that insight a little bit easier. With new changes to Collaborative Forecasting, your admin can gather opportunity data that can help your teams set expectations in much more accurate ways. Check out the overview!
Dynamic Forms - There have been few Salesforce features as anxiously awaited as Dynamic Forms. The ability to take fields and sections from your page layouts and turn them into individual components is an absolute game changer. There is a ton of information that can be housed on an Account, Contact, or Opportunity, and all of it is important for getting a true 360-degree view of your customer, but only some of it is important at every single moment of the day. That’s where Dynamic Forms come in. They help your users focus on exactly the information that they need to find when they need to find it!
To-Do Lists!! - Everyone, and let me say it louder for the people in the back, EVERYONE needs To-Do Lists! Any Salesforce user knows how important it is to keep track of their tasks, with the new To-Do List component, that daily activity has now become a major part of planning one’s day. Pop that beautiful little component down in the utility bar, and your team will never be stuck wondering what they have to take care of next again! I’m so excited about the added productivity!!
Service
Omni-Channel flows get case routing! - Gone are the labor-intensive days of finding and assigning an agent when dealing with Email-to-Case workflows. Salesforce has taken steps to save us all time and energy and empower our admins to automatically direct cases to qualified agents in a record-triggered flow!
Feedback Management comes to Service Cloud - One of the most important, yet often ignored parts of providing a great product, is listening to your customers. Feedback Management is one of the most incredibly innovative and interesting features that Salesforce has ever offered. When a chatbot finishes its job, it is imperative to get a survey in front of that customer, their experience, their satisfaction, and the information that they will provide to you is absolutely vital for driving your business. Feedback Management is a feature that puts exactly what your customers want, right in front of you so that you can make decisions based on data provided directly by your customer so that all parties benefit in the future.
Admin’s Corner
Welcome to the big league's Admins, DevOps Center is now Beta - Another nail is solidly added to the coffin of change sets. As Salesforce has matured so have the teams that build and plan around feature enablement and customizations. Now Salesforce has taken steps to empower Admins with a powerful and useful means to monitor, deploy, and document change. Soon the days of spreadsheets and verbose deployment plans written in Jira tickets will end. On that day, the DevOps Center will stand above the ashes while Admin teams far and wide cheer for victory. Until that day becomes a reality, you can check out the beta by installing it into a developer org and hooking it up to a GitHub repo.
Fancy that, Flow got a lot more powerful - No surprises here. Salesforce is dedicated to creating an arsenal of “Clicks not Code” tools that help drive incredibly powerful business automation. From new enhancements in flow builder, giving Admins the extra added ability to use logical operators and comparators in formulas. To brand new ways to test, debug, and monitor flow runtime. The investment in putting the power of Devs into the hands of Admins is evident, and it’s evidently working!
The flow enhancement section of the release notes is truly a sight to behold and deserves some time to dig into, we’ll create a future blog solely dedicated to all the new cool features, like Screen Flows through LWC, including external data in Flows, and cut-and-pastable flow elements, but for now, do yourself a favor and spend a few minutes reading about the future.
Dev Central
Development Notes - Don’t get jealous that Admins are getting all that Flow love. Developers are getting just as much, maybe in subtler ways, and the average Salesforce Dev’s world is changing. By empowering Admins with dev-like abilities in Flow, the focus of a Dev in the Salesforce ecosystem is to really pull off the most powerful stuff, and as the Marvel movies have stated repeatedly, with great power, comes great responsibility, so let’s keep our Admin friends safe from building something un-scalable like this:
Code Builder goes Beta - I’m going to be extremely direct about this. Code Builder needs some work, but in time, it will be the greatest gift that Salesforce has ever provided to the development community. When it’s ready, it will revolutionize the game. A fully cloud-based development environment changes the barrier of entry from an expensive laptop or fancy gaming computer, to any device that can run a browser. One day all any developer will need to have on them is a phone, and maybe a Bluetooth keyboard, and they can make a hotfix or incremental change with no need to have expensive hardware at the ready. Someday, the dream is a tablet and a beach, and Code Builder going Beta gets us one step closer.
Whew! That was a lot, and it’s not even really scratching the surface! Looking forward it seems like Salesforce is really gearing up to make 2023 a stellar year for innovation on the platform. We’re excited to get a deeper dive as we get our hands on this new technology, and we’d be excited to teach you all about what’s possible too!
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