Yet another packed release in our hands with Salesforce Winter 21′, even with the rather odd and challenging 2020 we are having, Salesforce once again has delivered a whopping 572 pages of goodness for us.
Here are the five that have resonated the most with me:
Multi-Object Flow Components
Get familiar with flows if you are not yet using these every day, Salesforce are getting a lot of investment attention.
There are quite a few flow-related enhancements, but this one specifically caught my eye as now flow screen components can be reusable across objects when you set them up with a generic sObject and sObject[] data types. Why not try building one that can be used for Contacts, Leads and Accounts?. Multi-Object Flow components make it very easy for you to have loosely coupled architecture for more flexibility.
Record-Triggered Flows on Delete
This is a new era for automation in Salesforce. One of the checkpoints to move from code to automate processes has been upon record deletion, until now! From this release onwards we can build a flow to perform actions right before a record is deleted from the database. Remember as a best practice always focus on low code.
Email Template Builder
At last we get a nicely upgraded UI for building templates! Instead of adding HTML code, users can drag elements to create templates and compose email templates with a few clicks to place design elements right where they want.
Again, low code, accessible for your users to self serve.
Email Scheduled Reports
This was a long time coming! It’s not always convenient to sign into Salesforce just to view a report, especially for users that are not in there often, now with report subscriptions you can also set it up to the inbox as an attachment of xlsx or csv (up to 15,000 rows and 30 columns). You may have some convoluted solution for this but now is the time to refactor and get the most out of it!
Build a Bot with Guided Setup
The Guided Setup Flow updates help to create a bot from a template that includes popular Salesforce actions such as ‘create a case’, ‘create a lead’, ‘add a case comment’, or look up an order, also includes conversational text and flows so you can customize it however works best for your company and enables you to go live sooner.
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Bonus! Early on the release notes you can find “Introducing Customer 360 Guides” that triggered my attention. It’s like a combo of packaged frames for us to base some artifacts to enhance (and present) Salesforce improvements; ranging from customer stories, playbooks, industry specific blueprints, architecture references, solutions kits and more!
Check it out: https://trailhead.salesforce.com/guides.
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Wondering: Field Service Lightning is now renamed to Field Service, Lightning Communities are now Experience Cloud. Is the name of Lightning slowly being dropped? Does this mean we finally made it?!