The Winter ’24 Salesforce Release is live! To help get you even more excited and prepared, we’ve curated some release highlights from the SIX episodes — Admin, Developer, Sales, Service, CRM Analytics, and Flow — of Release Readiness Live which we broadcast last month.
In the series, a group of 21 product managers showcased demos of the features their teams built for the release, presented roadmaps for future releases, and sat in the hot seat to answer questions live from the online audience.
There were numerous memorable moments, from exciting product announcements and challenging questions to the delightful surprise appearance of a beloved lamp.💡
Thematically, the features in this release are all about making it easier to get work done — something I’m sure all you admins can appreciate! From improvements in core functionality like permission set summary views and Lightning Web Components (LWC) performance to innovative features like reactive screen flows and Einstein call summaries, our Product teams have dedicated themselves to developing technology centered around your experience.
This means we’ve retired a whopping 202,000+ points from the IdeaExchange in this release! Keep submitting and voting on your ideas — our Product teams value your input and it makes a difference in how they build out the platform.
Now, let’s dig in and explore the most significant highlights from all six episodes.
User Access got some major upgrades this release thanks to the hard work of Cheryl Feldman and Larry Tung’s team. It’s now easier to track changes and troubleshoot access issues with user access audit trails, logs for public group membership changes, and new report types for permission set assignments, public group and queue membership, and account sharing. Let your inner control-freak flag fly high and enjoy being able to quickly see who has access to what, when it changed, and why someone is having access issues.
Love perm sets? Any true #AwesomeAdmin does. Which means you’re going to love the new Permission Set Summary View. It’s a game-changer because now you can quickly and easily see all the details about a permission set atop the page — no more scrolling for days.
And App Building is more customizable, since Dynamic Forms is now available for standard objects on desktop and mobile. That means you can extend your thoughtful app designs to your users’ devices, making it easy for them to get the info they need quickly on the go.
Uncover even more exciting announcements for admins by watching the full episode of Admin Preview of Release Readiness Live.
Get your happy robot dance moves ready, because in Winter ’24, Automation can do more than ever before. You can now streamline your user experience with reactive screen flows (including formulas and text) and take action on data outside of Salesforce with HTTP callouts and transform. These are truly transformative innovations that will make your flows so much better.
Add a maestro’s baton to your happy robot dance, because now you also have more control over complex automation with Orchestrations. You can now control when processes stop or continue using conditions for stages and steps. Plus, with new wait elements in Flow, you can control when flows are triggered based on date and amount of time. More control makes every admin happy, am I right?
And, last but definitely not least, you now have the ability to create custom error messages in Flow. Yes, you can now craft messages that make sense to your users when they hit an error in a flow. These Flow innovations are lit. Like Diana’s lamp.
Flownatics, don’t miss the full Flow episode of Release Readiness Live.
Special Announcement: Reports & Dashboards now have rich text filters, image components, and top-level filters for all editions! Ankita Dutta was able to share this glorious news live in the broadcast just weeks after getting feedback at Dreamforce about it. And she reported (hehe) that her team is working on a lot of great enhancements with a sneak-peek into the roadmap for Reports & Dashboards.
There are also some fantastic new Intelligence dashboards for Revenue, Service, and Segments that will help your organization make smarter business decisions more quickly. Yes, prebuilt, intelligent dashboards. That means you don’t have to use your own intelligence to build more dashboards.
We are data nerds, living in a data world. Which is why it’s fantastic that Data Cloud is reaching new parts of the platform. You can use Reports & Dashboards to analyze data from Data Cloud. Plus, you can use Data Cloud in record-triggered flows to set up automation based on external data changes.
And the data fun doesn’t stop there — Data Platform now uses staged data to speed up run time, has new connectors like Snowflake OAuth, and offers new query functions that use more than one variable. That means you can indulge your data nerdiness and take it to new heights.
New heights? Let’s make it a new universe with artificial intelligence (AI)! Now, you can also combine Data Cloud and artificial AI, bringing your own AI model into Salesforce with Amazon SageMaker and Einstein Studio for Data Cloud. Make sure your AI model is ready for its close-up, because Salesforce is waiting to shoot. 📸
Want to hear more about these analytics updates? Watch the CRM Analytics episode of Release Readiness Live.
Want to get work done easier and faster? Then you’re going to love what’s new in Sales Cloud. There’s a new user interface (UI) for Sales Planning and Pipeline Inspection, making it visually intuitive to see how your sales teams are performing. And your sales teams will be happier because the contextual enhancements within Salesforce (contacts and leads) and in the browser (embedded record matching) make it easier for them to get what they need, faster.
There’s fast, and then there’s faster. Enter AI: Einstein Insights to suggest automated actions for your sales team faster, Einstein GPT Sales emails to help your sales team create personalized communications faster, and Einstein Call Summaries to help capture important actionable information from your sales team’s calls…yup, faster.
And one more thing every admin will love (because, again, we like control): Audit history for Opportunity Teams and Split Entities so you can track changes over time.
Learn more by watching the Sales Cloud episode of Release Readiness Live.
This release added some serious Knowledge upgrades in Service Cloud. The new Lightning Article Editor and article personalization makes it so much easier to edit articles and customize which Service Console screens users see when viewing articles based on their permissions. Add that to your knowledge bank.
Make room in that knowledge bank for AI and get your kudos box ready, because when you enable Einstein work summaries and service replies for conversations, you’re going to save your reps from spending many hours reporting on their work and drafting communications.
Communications — do you mean email, text, or??? All of it! Because now Omni has a unified inbox experience, interruptible status, and proactive messaging which makes it easier for agents to keep track of and prioritize work, no matter the communications method. And you can next-level it with Apple Messages for Business, which let you build a personalized, cohesive experience on iOS devices so you can reach them as they’re trying to solve Wordle.
Watch the full Service Cloud episode of Release Readiness Live for more.
Yes, admins, we know some of you work with, or — gasp — are developers too. I didn’t forget about you! There are some powerful new tools like Einstein for Developers to help write and test code, GraphQL wire adapter support to make it easier to build contextual components, and dynamic Lightning web components which might be of interest to you adminelopers out there.
And for those of us very visually-oriented folks, there’s a pretty cool new Tableau Lightning web component you can use to bring Tableau Visualizations into Salesforce app pages. Yes, it’s literally pretty cool.
Check out more in the Developer Preview of Release Readiness Live.
We’re just scratching the surface with these highlights! If you want to learn more about all of the great features in the release, be sure to explore the Winter ’24 Release Highlights module on Trailhead and the Winter ’24 Release Notes.
You can also dive into the Learn MOAR Winter ’24 for Admins trailmix! The trailmix includes blog posts highlighting great new features for admins specifically. Happy learning!
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