The second installment of Salesforce’s 2023 releases provides some great eye candy for DevOps pros. From new admin features to user enhancements and the anticipated Flow updates, a lot is covered in the nearly 700-page Salesforce Summer ‘23 release. Let’s break down the highlights of some appealing features, why these updates will save all Salesforce users time and energy and explore key details of the impending transition to Flows.
First, we’ll break down notable updates from this release that will save you time, help DevOps teams automate faster and enhance the experience for both you and your customers.
User Enhancements
There are lots of great adjustments to some tools we know you’ve been waiting for and some we hope will be made available to all users.
● Mass Quick Actions on Related Lists: This is a beta feature that you can opt-in to try. You can now add and update records directly from a related list—a time and tab saver! This feature has been requested many times and will decrease the need for custom-built interfaces. For instance, if you’re on an Account and want to edit the related Contacts, you can add, edit or mass update directly from the Account screen. This saves clicks and stops new tabs from opening and losing your spot, etc. Allowing users to update in bulk is a major win!
● Einstein Search: Advance your search capabilities by having additional field types to search within, such as picklist, which were not previously searchable. For example, if you have a picklist field on Contact, you can search for one of the values and any records with that selected value will appear. Users will get more relevant results in their search. This new enhancement is in beta, so we’d highly suggest opting in to give it a test drive.
● Lightning reports and dashboards improvements, including:
Enhanced reports and dashboards with images and text descriptions let you add visualizations to your dashboards with company logos, helpful imagery or clarifying text. Explain exactly what the Dashboard is providing with helpful messaging or encourage the sales team with positive feedback about their work. This will not only better guide end users throughout the dashboard but will also increase engagement and personalization.
Additional dashboard filters permitted: Dashboard filter allowance jumped from 3 to 5, making dashboards more configurable and customizable for different views and end users.
A new ‘post to Slack’ option on dashboards: share analytics across your Slack workspaces so your colleagues can view, share, and subscribe to dashboard details and view in real-time.
Note: While all of these improvements to reports and dashboards are amazing features, they are only available to unlimited edition users. We hope Salesforce will trickle this down to enterprise users soon.
● MFA auto-enablement continues: Unless you’re using a single sign-on (SSO) solution like Okta, Salesforce mandates the use of multifactor authentication (MFA). Hard enforcement is coming by spring 2024 when Salesforce initiates a full rollout, so we’d suggest getting ahead of it by implementing this now.
Flows
With the forthcoming transition to Flows, we find that the more Salesforce does with Flows, the better. In general, it gives users better tools to deliver to customers and offers better experiences overall. These Flow Builder updates are key:
● Send API callouts without using code (this is in beta). This is like having Postman-like capabilities right in Flow!
● Create screens that react to changes from other components on the same screen. This is huge, since you can’t create reactive screens in Flows right now. Workflow optimization is all about reducing clicks, which users can now achieve with reactive forms (this is also in beta).
● Log emails and use email templates with the ‘Send Email’ action. This was rigid before, as users had to pull in their own templates or make very basic emails in Flows. This is a basic but hugely helpful upgrade.
Honorable Mentions
- The new Undo field change feature: A lot of you have been waiting for this (ourselves included) since there is no such thing as “undo” in Salesforce … until now!
- New Salesforce connect adapter for GraphQL: Developers and system architects will be happy to see this feature that allows you to access your external data by connecting to AWS Aurora via GraphQL queries from Salesforce as if the data were native. This saves you from having to copy and store your external data in Salesforce with complicated syncs.
We’re all always hunting for ways to save time and simplify processes. Once again, Salesforce delivered with the Summer ‘23 release. Fewer clicks, bulk actions and more sharing and collaboration capabilities. And this one has a little bit of excitement for everyone–admins, developers and end users.
The best thing you can do is to experiment with ways to optimize. There’s a lot in beta, so roll your sleeves up and dig in! Happy summer!
