Supercharge Your Flow Game with the Power of Documentation

Shout-out to all my fellow Flownatics!

Do you love Salesforce Flow? Of course you do! As a former customer and community member, I’ve loved Salesforce Flow for a very long time. But when I joined Salesforce and the Automation Services Content and Communications Experience (documentation) team, I was surprised to learn just how much love and passion the Salesforce Flow teams have for it as well. You might even say they have a lot of devflowtion. The engineers put an extraordinary amount of care and detail into their efforts, and the product managers are always thinking about the customers first. It’s one thing to use a tool like Salesforce Flow, believing that something like this must take a team of great people to make it happen. It’s another thing to actually see it.

The CCX team is no exception! Ben brings the smiles and keeps us organized, Chris is our resident Trailhead whisperer, Eve is our newest member and an Industries expert, Michael does dev doc, Tess can spot a needed edit at 100 paces, and our leader, Geri, supports and encourages us all. Together, we make a lot of the text you see written about Salesforce Flow and all of Salesforce’s automation products and tools. We even write the UI text in Flow Builder and the various automation tools.

But I know you, dear reader. You’re here for the good stuff, the meat and flowtatoes! Let’s look at some of the things our team produces, and how you can best use them to your advantage! And, of course, you’ll enjoy some more flow puns!

1. Salesforce Help

First and foremost, we write use case-based product documentation! We write and maintain all the documentation in the Automate Your Business Process section of Salesforce Help. Here, you can find docs for our various automation products, including, of course, Salesforce Flow. While some of what’s here is introductory documentation, you can also find a number of topics that are useful to everyone, whether you’re a Flownatic or just starting your own exflowration. Here are some highlights that were very useful to me as a customer and partner.

• Which Automation Tool Do I Use? — This topic can help you not only decide which automation tool to use for a specific task but also educate your management or partners.
• Flow Best Practices — Everyone who builds flows should read this page at least once! And maybe come back to it every few months or so. I know it’s all too easy to get out of good habits, but the tips here can help set us back on the path.
• Per-Transaction Flow Limits — As powerful as Salesforce Flow is, it’s not without limits, and it’s not always obvious when your flow hits those limits. But if you know those limits, you can design your flows in ways that avoid hitting them. When you have a flow that doesn’t complete its data operations, it might be because it hit one of the limits listed in this topic.

2. Release Notes

Even though our Salesforce Help documentation is very important, it’s not our most-read content. That honor goes to everyone’s favorite Salesforce publication: the release notes! If you’re not reading these important product updates just as soon as they’re published, you should definitely make the time. Your org, your devs, and your end users will thank you. And keep checking back! With each Salesforce Release, the release notes are first published as a preview version. Some topics get updates before the release is deployed to your orgs. You can see a list of all the changes we make in the topic called “Release Note Changes.”

Salesforce Flow and its cousin, Einstein Next Best Action, are moving out of the Customization section of the release notes and into the shiny new Einstein Automate section! They’re joining other Einstein Automate features such as Einstein Bots, Einstein Recommendation Builder, MuleSoft Composer for Salesforce, OmniStudio, and Flow Orchestrator (currently in pilot). Elevating the Einstein Automate release notes to their own section shows just how much Salesforce continues to believe in automation’s flowtential!

Here’s a random piece of trivia: See the number at the end of the release notes URL, “230”? That’s the ID number that we use internally for the Spring ’21 Release. It always goes up by 2, so the Summer ’21 Release will be 232!

3. Trailhead

Let’s not forget about Trailhead! The Automation Services CX team designs and writes almost all Trailhead content related to Salesforce Flow, and our trail is called Automate Your Business Processes with Salesforce Flow. We also maintain our trail, updating the modules in sync with each release, and are considering adding new modules in the future!

While we’re talking about Trailhead, let me recommend a solid Salesforce Flow module that hasn’t gotten much attention. Screen Flow Distribution outlines a number of useful applications for flows, such as placing them in actions and communities. It’s great for helping beginner flow builders think about flows in new ways, and might flow-tivate you to try developing something new and highly useful.

4. The Record-Triggered Automation Architect Guide

Actually, this guide was written by Tim Peng, one of the Salesforce Flow product management directors, but when I first read it, I knew I had to share it with the community. If you’ve ever wanted to know, in exact detail, how Salesforce Flow does bulkification, how Flow processes records in different scenarios, or what the Flow pros recommend as best practices for complex scenarios, then this guide is for you. If you’re a major Flow nerd (like me), this guide makes for some fascinating reading!

Check out the Record-Triggered Automation Guide at the Salesforce Architects site. And watch for new Flow architect guides coming soon!

How can you help?

It might sound cliché, but it’s absolutely true that everything our team does is for you, our fellow Flownatics in the Salesforce Flow community! If you’d like to see anything new or different in our docs, please let us know! Fill out the Salesforce Flow Documentation Survey and tell us what we’re doing right, and what we could do better.

Until next time, Flownatics — keep your code low and your docs close!

More Resources

Check out the Automation for Admins page for more tips and best practices on automation.