Automating for Efficiency
Salesforce Winter’24 update is finally here and we cannot wait to share with you what functionalities and features we have liked the most.
As you probably know, Salesforce has 3 releases a year. Every time they roll out their product improvement plan, but what is possibly even more important, they combine it with their community’s feedback. If you have been struggling with something that you think should be an obvious functionality coming out of the box, someone likely already already brought this idea up. You can check it out here. Salesforce Idea Exchange is the place for the community to share their needs for the expansion of standard Salesforce functionalities. With the incoming release, as it is for all Salesforce releases, you need to be aware of the timing. The details of what will happen at which time can be found below:
As you can see there are multiple steps that can and should be taken.
The first step of any release is Release Notes. Release Notes essentially is the first documentation that is available for you to review what you can expect in very high detail. The next steps are signing up for Pre-Rlease Org and Sandbox Preview, which give you the chance to experience incoming features first-hand. It is important that you and your team have a very good understanding of all incoming features so that you can decide ahead of time which ones to enable for your production rollout. It is noteworthy that Salesforce releases are, in the majority of cases seamless, however, making sure new features work well with your existing setup ensures the best end-user experience.
Alright, after this short introduction to what Salesforce release is and how to easily access all the features beforehand, let’s jump into what you are here for - what are the hottest functionalities hitting us this time around?
Changes to Permissions
If you did not know, now you know. The retirement of permissions in profiles is coming and is inevitable. If this is news to you and you have entered the panic mode, do not worry. Salesforce is doing everything to gear you up with all the tools that you will need in order to minimize the impact and help you prepare for this major change.
If you have ever struggled with understanding what users have certain permission sets or permission groups assigned, and you had to check it individually - this will be the change for you. With the Winter’24 release, you will be able to use Reports to view all users assigned to a custom permission set or permission set group. You simply need to ask your admin to create a new custom report type based on the Permission Set Assignments object.
Who has not felt overwhelmed or frustrated when asked “Can you tell me what this permission set does” should cast the first stone. The well-documented solution is a rare fruit. Having to go into many permission sets to check what exactly they do was a truly painful experience for most admins and product owners. Salesforce has heard and we are getting a new button on a permission set “View Summary - Beta”. The button will display permissions given by the permission set on a single page.
Some honorable mentions concerning permissions changes of the Winter’24 release are:
● API names available on permission set level - allows you to easily distinguish between two fields with the same name
● Number displaying how many permission set groups a particular permission set is used in
● Recalculate button - whenever required, you can now manually trigger recalculation without having to edit the permission set group
Change the owner on a Dashboard
I am sure you are familiar with the button that allows you to easily change the owner of almost any record in Salesforce like Account, Case, or Opportunity. Imagine your colleague has built a great Dashboard that you are all using and he leaves the company. You are left with the task of transferring the ownership to your name, and to your surprise, the change owner button is not there! In order to have a different owner, until now you would have to clone and re-create the whole Dashboard. With the Winter’24 release, assuming you have the manage permissions to the folder the Dashboard is saved in, you can simply transfer the ownership of it using the standard button that we are all familiar with:
Sharing improvements
Finally, what would be a major permission update without neat sharing quality of life improvements? Sharing analysis came down to role hierarchy and sharing rules. Following that white rabbit would ensure that you know who has access to which records, right?
Wrong!
What you may be forgetting is manual sharing. It was not easy to maintain a clear view of who exactly has access to your key information. With this release, Salesforce is enabling reporting for manual sharing, account teams, and even public group membership. This change makes it much easier to secure your most valuable information. Data security and protection remain a high-priority focus point for Salesforce releases.
Dynamic Forms and document scanning for Salesforce Mobile App
Salesforce is yet again improving on its mobile application. As you probably are aware, Dynamic Forms were implemented in order to allow companies to create intuitive and responsive pages that would display the right information at the right time based on the user context. What is more, is that you can put fields directly onto the lighting record page without having to put it on the object’s layout. The main benefit of Dynamic Forms is that it drastically limits the need to create multiple page layouts, which I am sure you will agree with me, can be quite a hustle to maintain. Now they are becoming available for Mobile Applications as well, which is a huge step forward in making the user experience more seamless between desktop and mobile.
To add on top of that, you will be able to scan documents with LWC and Salesforce Mobile. If you only have a physical version of a document and you want a quick and easy way to associate it with the correct record now you can. It saves you quite a lot of time of having to scan the document, save it on your PC, and then use the desktop version of Salesforce to navigate to the correct record.
Test features in a Sandbox
If you would like to know how you can check in your org what can be enabled from incoming or past releases you can go to your Setup > Quick Find > Release Updates. What may come as a surprise is that you may even be able to enable test runs for features coming in the release of 2025.
Conclusion
Those are our favorite three features coming up in the Winter’24 release. Whether you are an end-user, an administrator, or a developer, these updates offer something valuable for everyone. Please let us know what you think brings the most business value or quality of life improvement.
If we were able to grasp your interest and you would like to see what other exciting upgrades, like Lead and Contact intelligence view, mass quick actions, or dynamic form expansion, are coming, you can find all of the Winter’24 release notes HERE.
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