Salesforce Spring 21 release: What excites me

Release notes for Spring 21 release of Salesforce is now available and here are some of the additions or changes that I’m looking forward to use.

Go with the flow

More branding changes. Lightning flow is now Salesforce flow and it packs more punch. The most interesting ones are the ability to refer to prior value of a record and in case of screen flows to add up to four columns. This should help avoid a few more scenarios we depend on Apex and Lightning components.

When it comes to flows, debugging them based on emails has also been a chore. Now you can open up the failed scenario within flow builder to better grasp what happened. I really like this feature!

On a related note, it has also become easier to identify the resource impact of an automation and this will really help while working on high volume objects

Good bot!

Bot flows get easier as we can now get record details in the context of a bot itself without offloading that to a separate flow.

More control over offline access

Salesforce is letting admins control what data can be accessed offline on Field Service mobile app with briefcase feature.

Live status tracking

So many clients have asked me for this! And finally they can share the live status of their worker headed towards a site with the customers natively.

Can you see my screen?

Remote detailing and sales pitches are more common now so the new Meeting Studio should be pretty interesting. No clarity on the $$$ impact of this feature though.

Just drop the A

Good bye SAQL? I hope so. Salesforce Einstein, oh sorry, I meant Tableau CRM now supports SQL albeit in beta. This change should help onboard more people to tableau CRM and faster.

Offloading becomes easier

Salesforce Functions is now in beta now this means that any logic that might otherwise exceed Salesforce governor limits can be offloaded and called from Apex on-demand. I wonder how soon before we can invoke it directly from flow and process builders.

What’s making it slow?

Lightning App Builder performance suggestions have been improved now. You can get a better understanding of which section is causing the delay with this. Very nice!

Heads-up!

I’m a big fan of In-App Guidance even though it is available only with MyTrailhead. Now it let’s you add prompts during a record creation or edit flow as well. This could really help wit roll out and adoption.

Some annoyances quashed

  1. Lookup field now supports Opportunity products. Thank you so much!
  2. SOQL has some small changes and for the better.
  3. You can adjust forecasting from mobile as well. About time.
  4. Recently viewed list view now supports custom actions. So we no longer ave to worry about standard New button conflicting with the custom process created for any object.
  5. Salesforce CMS content can now be deployed. This is a big help and will go a long way in avoiding re-work in content creation.
  6. Lookup null values won’t lead to unhandled exceptions in flows and process builders.
  7. Report creation in lightning interface is slightly easier now as you can now drag and drop multiple fields in report builder.

The whole release notes are worth reading and I would strongly urge you to make time for it. Especially the changes coming up related to API and new objects covered.

PS: Salesforce release notes is now being moved under Salesforce Help


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