Spring 2022 arrived so I did the maintenance work to welcome this update! I still have a lot of work to do to review NPSP, PMM, and OFM updates. To get behind means accepting mounting technical debt. However, to try to make it easier for my small but mighty friends, I record my process of unpacking the Power of Ten license grant products so it can go faster and easier for you. The full blog is here: https://mighyforce.dreamhosters.com/2022/06/unpacking-summer-2022-sales-and-service-cloud/ It won't all fit here in Trailblazer.
I first review the actions that admins have to take to enable or configure things. Then I test out new features and decide if any user education is required and how quickly to try to adopt the new features. I follow the outline that I put together from my "Top Candy" review that I did prior to the release. I usually find a few surprises and this time is no exception.
To find out what is available and where, go through How and When Do Features Become Available? carefully. I found these that require action on the admin’s part to enable. Not many things go around.
- Enable Analytics Home (Beta) in Reports and Dashboard Settings. There have been updates in the last year so make sure you are opting into all the improvements. All the boxes are checked except hide Excel export.
- Creating Reports Based on Selected Salesforce Objects (Beta) requires contacting SF to be added to the Beta. They turned me down last time so I’m not sure I’ll do it this time… but maybe.
Checkout out the new features that I found and used. One item surprised me and one disappointed:
1. Email Builder Improvement! I had slated Dynamic Related lists to be the thing I really like but… (see below). However, I found that I really love this very simple improvement to the email builder. We can now make the properties side panel on the right much wider. I use the email builder for all my new transactional emails. Before, the html text was narrow and required a lot of scrolling up and down to edit. Now it’s so much better! If you haven’t tried it out, it’s way time
2. Triggered Flows: It’s very nice now to go to the object manager, focus in on one object you want, and be able to see flow triggers on another page just as you can see fields, search layouts, Lightning record pages, page layouts, Apex triggers, etc. From there you can go to the Flow Trigger Browser. You can also create a new flow. All quite nice.
We also get entry conditions using a formula rather than just field conditions with this release! These really help make your implementation higher performing.
In my opinion, Salesforce just silently answered the architectural question of “should there be more than one flow per object?” Why would we need a run-time flow execution order manager otherwise? The future is smaller automation flows customized for specific tasks and broken down into natural units. My advice: don't repeat yourself in design (google ‘Keep it D.R.Y.'), always meet your needs based on user stories as best you can, and consider your total cost of ownership including maintenance when deciding to add to an existing flow or make a new one. Performance orgs also need to make full use of entry conditions on all the flows.
3. Flow debugging: you can create tests as part of your development process. Or record a successful debug and test future modifications to see if they still get the answer right! You create tests right from the editor window. You save debug runs as new tests from the debugger window.
I defined three tests for my new record trigger flow to correct one of our common data entry errors on new client creation. First you give it a name and set a few details, then you set the input record and field update values. Then you set the output field conditions necessary to pass and create a custom error message for yourself. You can rerun them all by selecting all tests and clocking Run. Pretty awesome! You can activate with failing tests. Since the test depends on records in the org (like the debugger) this makes the tests not portable from sandbox to production and back.
4. Screen Flows: We now get section headers that are user collapsible. And name and address support in screen flows using record fields model. I built in 3 minutes a very functional and modern screen flow to update contact information. It has sections for name, mailing, emails, and phone along with various opt outs. I defined the one contact record variable but flow did all the rest for me. I am disappointed we can't preconfigure sections to be collapsed initially. The address field gets Google lookup to help keep entry errors to a minimum.
Note: I also remain VERY disappointed in the Salesforce response to my requests to evaluate if salutation can be removed from features as mandatory. I feel this is a severe equality issue. You’ll note that if you use the standard name field, the first thing you are asked to do is decide a salutation for a new contact. And the same is true on editing any name field in a Lightning record page. It even steals cursor focus if it is first on the edit page for those navigating with the keyboard. At the very least new features like the flow field should be designed to opt out of salutation. At this point, the best equality affirming practice I can recommend is to remove all gender dependent picklist values (opting for things like Rev., Hon., Dr. and none, for example but skipping the bias generating Mr. Mrs. Ms. etc). Highlighting this field and mandating it worldwide seems VERY poor to me. This field should be optional, Salesforce!
5. Reports Browser Release. It's nice but as a ways to go before it addresses some of the more common sources of user errors in creating reports. You can read my reasons in the full blog.
6. Dynamic Related List component for Lightning DESKTOP Pages. This arrived as advertised. It does not support mobile so I can’t really use it frequently as we support mobile and desktop users with equivalent functions (we’re using Enhanced Lightning Grid). It’s a big step up from Related Lists the former ways, but I’m only going to recommend it for brand new lightning pages when you need to show a set of related records that is not going to grow lengthy (max is 30). It has too many limited user experience issues for me to recommend retrofitting into pages that are already in use. You can’t rename the headings and include the related object so it’s unlikely the user can read them in or that you can match previous names users are used to seeing. It doesn’t include an indication of more than the maximum records (30) or paging or a way to get to any remaining records. It doesn’t support mobile. For the admin, the UX is nice since you can configure things on the lightning page editor rather than the page layout. However, the same data displayed while you edit isn’t real and the experience finding for filtering fields is very poor. The records filter is limited to AND logic. I look forward to this component evolving.
I couldn’t come up with a good application for this in my org to show because of the heading labels not being customizable and always including the related object name (e.g., Volunteer Hours: Start Date, Opportunity: Amount). This just creates too poor a UX to populate into my awesome Lightning pages. Without this, I could use it for lists that will be limited in length like Open Opportunities on an account page, Upcoming Volunteer Signups on a Contact page, Pending Changes on an Inventory Item. I can’t use it on lists that grow beyond 30 since there is no way to get to the remaining items or even any indication that there are remaining items.
I'd love to get your take on what's new that you love and any configuration issues you run into in Power of Ten products that I may have missed.
#New Releases #Automation @UnofficialSF Discussion @Nonprofit Hub @Hub Heroes @Education Hub @Nonprofit and Education MindShare @Enhanced Lightning Grid
Thanks! My privilege. I try very hard to support our small nonprofits. Salesforce is a great solution but can overwhelm.
