Update on Winter 21 Top Ten Items for Power of Ten License Holders!

Unwrapping Winter 21 Release!

First, I logged in this morning. I got a brand new admin only in-app guidance telling me about MFA. But this also told me that Winter 21 is installed. I also had emails from Salesofrce telling me the scheduled upgrade completed. 

Second things was to google and find the HTML Winter 21 Release notes. They are also available in PDF if you prefer. Then I went directly to the section about how and when do features become available. Many features are automatic. But some features require admin work and some require asking Salesforce to do something. The latter two were my focus. I scanned down the column to see what required my intervention in terms of features I have from Power of Ten.

I'll post what I found as a comment to help break this up.

Third, I went to my top ten list of Winter 21 Candy for power of 10 license grant recipients. I like to see if the feature is there, how I can use it, and try to find an initial use case. Since I didn't see it initially, I'll add the Mobile Launchpad feature.

1 Dynamic actions for most standard objects on desktop (joining custom objects from Summer) and for custom objects in mobile! Both Beta. Standard object dynamic buttons is a quick win for me, just as it was for custom objects in Summer 21. I was able to configure buttons on our contact page in the highlights panel lightning component to be visible or not based on the values of rollup data for client programs, volunteer programs, donor activity, etc. 

On custom objects, once I had created dynamic desktop buttons there was also a checkbox to enable it for mobile. This is per record page. Four round buttons appeared at the top of the record above the other highlight panel info. Note that form factor is one of the conditions so I could have different buttons on mobile than desktop if desired. This is really great once it comes to standard objects since you can really save screen space by only showing relevant buttons! I also made the delete button disappear for non-admin users on one object once status has advanced beyond planning (using user profile name containing admin). This also saves space and improves data integrity. 

I'm looking forward to thinking carefully about all these buttons especiually once dynamic field placement comes out for all objects. Buttons can be standard actions, custom actions (which can be tied to interactive flows), or quick actions. So there is a whole lot of power here.

2 New fields auto add to custom report types. Yay! Beta. I enabled it in my profiles. It's a system permission. Then I went to report editor to try it out. I created a new report and selected the managed package version of Contacts with Volunteer Hours and Volunteer Job. I have heavily customized my VH object and none of those fields were available previously in this report type. For this reason, I have a custom report type. But not, all those fields are available on the lighting report editor! Fabulous! I'm not entirely sure this is a proper test because that report type might not be managed. I did a different test using Accounts with Volunteer Hours (which is managed report type). The report has limited fields from VH and does not contain custom fields. So I'm not sure if this works or what limitations are on it yet.

3 Scheduled list email sending! Worked like a charm. I have an email template that I send to donors on the anniversary month of their first donation. I just indicates how important they are to us and gives them a star rating (based on how many years they have given in and how many years they increased giving level by at least 10%). I updated the template on Saturday morning but watned to send the list email Sunday evening. I set it and will forget it. Hopefully I'll get an email Sunday evening letting me know that 47 donors were sent their donor appreciation certificates with this new feature! 

Flow got more love than any other customization product. The writing’s on the wall that admins and developers must use flow for maximum impact. The great news is that with every release it simply gets easier and more powerful.

4 Flow: Filter logic added to record searches! Before every condition was ended. So you had to really struggle to do custom logic searches in flow. No more! So now when you get records in a flow, you have the choice of using AND (as in the past), OR (new) or custom logic. I don't have a use case at this moment, but I can recall having big troubles in FLOWS when I needed to do this in the past.

5 Flow: Auto layout editor friendlier for learning and time saver. When you create a new flow, you are asked to use manual layout or auto layout. I chose auto layout on a new flow I was making. It's very clean looking. you are presented with a start and end element and a plus sign on the line between. You click the plus sign to pull up a menu of things to add. Much nicer than dragging an item onto the palette and then needing to wire it up. Decisions create one new wire per possible branch. Oddly it now forces default outcome to merge bck into the flow with the other outcomes. This takes away a sloppy way to exit flow (by not hooking up the outcome). You also can't drag items to reorder, but instead you can select and copy the lower one, click the plus sign above the upper one, select the paste option, and then delete the original lower one. I expect this will get better. There is no zoom that I could find so I found myself having to struggle to click something off the canvas with something like this: click an element in view, drag the whole palette up, then go back and click what I wanted to click. Not efficient but I imagine it will get better.

6. Record triggered flows get criteria. I had one record triggered flow that I needed to update that includes two decisions boxes first thing to test if it should really be running. It was cleaning to put these in the trigger conditions. I was able to do that easily using exactly the same format. That cleaned up my flow a bit. Not sure it adds any new capability since you could always just include a decision box to exit inside the flow.

7 Flow: Debug auto launched flow. Flows that automatically run when records are created or updated is super fast and really the way of the future for Edmonds. Now you can debug them! My assumption is this does work. While you can run the dubugger on a before save records, it just fails since there isn't an ID to set in the debugger. Perhaps they will improve this in future.

8 Flow: Debug flow as another user. This is only available in sandboxes. I don't regularly work with a sandbox so I can't test. But it's available in the debug interface (just can't be set in production) so I assume it does and will be nice. 

9 Tabs work better to navigate a lightning page. This is billed as an accessibility update, but for those of us who like to be mouseless, this is priceless. I don't really know how to test or check this. Seems OK when I try to go mousehold and tab to the first view buttons on the page.

10- Lightning record page performance analyzer. You can now get Salesforce his opinion about what you can do to speed up your record pages. This is visible when you edit the record page. I clicked it and it told me some things about my contact page. In my case it noticed that I don't have a detail component and suggested I need one. I don't because I'm displaying field information conditionally through related record components. It also says I have way too many components in the page. But that's because I have a bunch of conditional components that show badges like VIP Donor, Donor, or Lapsed Donor (three components). And similar for other attributes like volunteer and client. It is arguably slower. When dynamic field placement comes to custom objects I may be able to improve this. The page analysis was not that exciting but perhaps it will be more useful over time and as I get more exposure to its recommendations.

11 Email template builder. I’m skeptical, since this is yet another email template format but hopefully this one will be worth it! So I went to the email tab in my account page where I usually send my donor thank you personal notes and didn't see any changes. I used the app picker to select email templates and created a new template. Once I saved a new blank template, I had the option of using builder. I created a nice email relatively intuitively with merge fields for the donor name, a paragraph of thank you, a nice looking button to give again, and included two photos. To include photos, I had to first have them on my local device, then select image. There was a pretty intuitive way to upload new photos and select them. Attachments are not part of what can be done with the builder. I then managed to select the new template for thanking people from my account email widget and send it. Not bad! Tweaking of the template is allowed within the email component although I saw that I could lock the components of the template as well with the builder.

12 Flow: Trigger flow before record delete. I’m not really a big fan of deleting records at all. However, you can now update things using Flow when the record is deleted if you need to.