Our forward-looking statement applies to the roadmap information shared in this post. Because roadmap items can change at any time, make your purchasing decisions based on currently available technology.
True to the Core is a favorite session at Salesforce events, especially for Salesforce Admins, because it provides a live, unscripted conversation with Salesforce executives and product managers about the future of our products. The questions asked and the feedback provided help shape what the product teams work on in future releases. The live conversation is a natural extension of the digital conversations that many admins contribute to throughout the year on the IdeaExchange.
New at Dreamforce ’22 was a breakout session dedicated to highlighting work in progress based on feedback from True to the Core and the IdeaExchange. During True to the Core: From Feedback to Features, product managers working on platform features shared what they’ve heard from the community—and what they’re doing in response. Check out the highlights below and visit the corresponding IdeaExchange ideas to follow the journeys of these community-requested features coming to fruition as platform features.
Cheryl Feldman, Director, Product Management (who is also a customer turned product manager), has big plans in the works to improve permissions, permission sets, and record type assignments.
What Cheryl heard: Customers need the ability to assign certain permissions without providing too much access. For example, a community member shared, “First level support needs to be able to log in as our sales users. Either I have to give delegated admin or modify all data. Both grant too much access.”
There are several ideas related to this on the IdeaExchange representing more than 70,000 points. Cheryl’s team is building a new permissions framework and exploring how to group or segment metadata, associate it with a permission set, and effectively provide more granular permissions.
Making it easier to report on and administer permissions is also a focus for the team. In Spring ’23, they plan to release Permission Set Groups for Delegated Admins (see this related idea), with further plans to improve the user interface in future releases.
Additionally, via an open beta, you can try creating permission sets in the Field Creation wizard. You can also use the User Access & Permissions Assistant, which is now a fully supported app, with some improvements to reporting limitations planned for the next 6 to 12 months. See this related idea, which has more than 63,000 points.
The community has also been vocal about ways to help admins be more efficient when assigning record types. Based on feedback from this idea, the team is working on designs to improve this process. Have suggestions? Drop a comment on the idea.
Julie Thompson, Sr. Director, Product Management, recently joined the Platform team after working on Experience Cloud for several years. She and Nate Hossner, Sr. Product Manager, are continuing to advance the highly sought-after functionality with Dynamic Forms and Dynamic Related Lists.
Based on the #1 IdeaExchange idea of all time, Dynamic Forms was released for custom objects in the Winter ’21 Release. Given that work needs to be done on each standard object, individual ideas for the most popular objects were created on the IdeaExchange to capture relative interest.
Dynamic Forms for the Account, Opportunity, and Contact objects is available in the Winter ’23 Release, with Lead to follow in Spring ’23 and Case in Summer ’23. A pilot for Dynamic Forms on mobile is also slated for Spring ’23. The team plans to support 600 more standard objects by Winter ’24!
Nate’s team continues to focus on the Related Lists experience to address feedback, such as “having to click two to three times to determine if a Contact is still with an Account.” In Summer ’22, Nate’s team released improvements to Lightning App Builder so related lists can be configured more easily, including selecting columns, filters, actions, and the sort order. New in Winter ’23 is an easier way to filter on multi-select picklist items. Up next, anticipated for Spring ’23, will be support for “View All.”
Diana Jaffe, Sr. Director, Product Management, is helping admins with the transition to Salesforce Flow by addressing feedback related to collections and governor limits. To aid in scenarios like wanting to find all accounts that have active opportunities missing specific data, Diana’s team has brought the ability to use the “IN” and “NOT IN” operators for flows in the Winter ’23 Release.
This functionality helps to create more performant flows and avoid limits. Diana played a game of “can you spot the difference?” between these two flows. Can you?
The IN operator no longer requires a Data Manipulation Language (DML) action within a loop, helping avoid potential flow limits. Also new to Winter ’23 is the ability to easily update related records, most useful for record-triggered flows. This allows records to be updated without loops or Get Record elements, closing a feature difference between Process Builder and Flow.
To extend this even further, Diana’s team is considering expanding the use of the IN operator beyond primitive data types. They also plan to safely remove the 2,000 element limit, anticipated for Spring ’23. And the work doesn’t stop there! They’re looking at scenarios for traversing a record filter and picking fields on related records. Take a look at the related Flow ideas, and drop your use cases in the comments or create a new idea.
Belinda Wong, VP, Product Management, is no stranger to feedback from True to the Core about the Setup experience. She’s nearly heard it all, most succinctly summed up as, “Why are there so many different experiences in Setup?”
She explained that the complications of Setup span such a wide area that no one product manager owns it. However, she’s evangelizing the need for the Salesforce User Experience (UX) team to create patterns for each product team to adopt, and for testing to detect deviations from the patterns. She’s also advocating for a Setup “champion” to exist within each scrum team. While the results of this work may take longer to see, this is the beginning of a turning point for the Setup experience.
In the True to the Core spirit of creating a space for dialogue, the team left time for questions from the audience. Here are summarized highlights from question-askers and the responses from product managers.
Q: Will there be improvements to Dynamic Forms and Dynamic Related Lists with Person Accounts?
A: This is something the team is actively investigating. A reason it’s not a “quick fix” is because some of the underlying components are Aura-based, while others are Lightning web components. The team is working to transition to LWC. Julie is open to receiving feedback via any related idea(s) or directly on the Trailblazer Community.
Q: Will Dynamic Forms be available for Experience Cloud sites?
A: Julie echoed that this is a common ask. It’s the team’s vision to eventually apply the work of Dynamic Forms on the platform to make that available in Experience Cloud.
Q: Will the parity gaps between Classic and Lightning for approval processes (that is, approval history) be addressed?
A: Diana shared that the Flow team is not investing in the existing approval processes at the moment, but that there is work in the general approval space with some other solutions (that is, Flow Orchestrator, Slack).
Q: As power users of Flow, how can we report bugs that we’ve found workarounds to?
A: When contacting Support doesn’t yield the creation of a bug, sharing the use case and workaround on the Trailblazer Community (for example, in the Automation group) gives other community members access to the workaround and raises its visibility to the Automation team, which is active on the community.
Q: Will there be an easier way to assign access to a group of users?
A: Cheryl shared there is a closed beta of a new feature, User Access Policies, which allows access (permissions sets, permission set groups, permission set licenses, managed package licenses, groups, and teams) to be assigned based on attributes. It’s planned to be in open beta with the Spring ’23 Release.
Have feedback for product managers? Contribute to an existing idea or post a new one on the IdeaExchange. Also, learn more about how product managers use your feedback to help shape their releases by earning the IdeaExchange Basics badge on Trailhead.
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