With a whopping 556 pages of release, we see more than 10% is the table of contents, and around another 10% is Tableau CRM, so what does that tell us?
First things first, we feel compelled to stress the importance of preparation for something coming soon: enforced Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA). The topic deserves its own entry, but for now block time to read on this.
Starting from Feb 22 it will be enforced. Today you can turn on MFA directly in Salesforce or use your single sign-on (SSO) provider’s MFA service. It may not be that simple, and please don’t JUST turn it on. This needs some planning and rollout.
The main reason for this change is for Salesforce to increase security, and with credentials in the technology space nowadays is just not enough.
Now, if you have any shared user record: from the ones of integration users, partners, part-timers / NGO-volunteers, dev team pipeline etc. you will need to carefully consider your options here.
Some product families have already enforced it like with Marketing Cloud, with no notice and prep like we are having to core platform services.
Check: Get Users Ready for Multi-Factor Authentication with Change Management Resources https://sfdc.co/download-mfa-rollout-pack
Let jump into features. Here some of the things that have caught my attention:
Lightning Pages get Interactive!
You will be able to define that an action in one component can update other components on the page. Selecting a component on the Page Builder now has a second sub-tab next to “Properties” to define your “Interactions”.
I want to play with it and see how far it goes! Also with the pilot on the Action bar. For example, does clicking a quick action (i.e. See Assets) unhide a Single Related list? Or can you filter a list and change to descending order?
Flows get Rollbacks!
This is very good, if a transaction fails you don’t want other bits of your flow to have run. So from the ‘fault’ path you can now also roll back a transaction and cancel all its pending record changes in a screen flow.
Flows get outbound messages!
Hurray, last but not least, one of the things you could do with the olden days workflowrules at last joins the back to the future so that you can trigger outboundmessages as actions in your flows. Bravo!
Einstein Recommendations get freebies!
Similar to what happened to Salesforce Surveys now, one gets the first 5,000 Next Best Action requests per month for free, then of course if you like it and use loads you can buy more.
Bots get Reports!
Up to now, you had a performance page on the area of Einstein Bots setup. In all honestly what you can see there is quite limited, even with the extension of Tableau CRM.
With this release you will have records that you can in fact query with standard reports functionality. Although it seems at this point to be only logs for the past seven days. At least you will be able to group data and see patterns over hours and dialogs.
More but Beta version:
Dashboards get Dynamic!
This beta feature sounds rather interesting, where a gauge chart component on your dashboard can adjust dynamically to other metrics. The example given in the release notes is about how a subsidiary (Singapore) is doing by % comparison with the overall business performance, expected to be a 50% in the example.
This means that the charts can scale beyond ‘hard coded’ figures. That’s an interesting enhancement, and makes us wonder where this is heading towards!
…aaaand a couple which are not ‘core’ that particularly caught my attention:
Amazon S3 gets Tableau CRM data!
With the introduction of output connectors into Salesforce last time, now you can send your cooked data from Einstein Analytics platform into an S3 bucket, the name of S3 stands for: Simple Storage Service. Which is the same storage infrastructure that Amazon.com uses to run their famous e-commerce.
Pardot automation gets 3rd party apps prospect data!
Marketing App Extensions are here to link the prospect actions there like attendance to a webinar to be used in Engagement studio and or automations. Yes! There are valuable prospect actions happening beyond Pardot assets. I’m eager to see how it actually works and which requisites there are, i.e. only set connector apps?
But that’s not it, there are tons of things like the report inline editing extra field types, LWC enters the Tableau CRM arena, Bot templates, customise button labels on your flows,
What are the upcoming features that caught YOUR attention?