Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Jennifer Lee, Lead Admin Evangelist at Salesforce.
Join us as we chat about all the cool new features coming in the Winter ‘27 Release, including Builder Central, Setup with Agentforce, and what’s new with Flow.
You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Jennifer Lee.
First of all, this is the first week with our new format, there will be a video version as well. Coming soon to the Salesforce Admins YouTube channel to see demos, clips, and visual explainers for each episode. Today, we’re looking ahead to the Winter ‘27 Release with Jennifer Lee to find out which new features admins need to know about.
One thing that generated a lot of excitement at Dreamforce is Builder Central. It’s an intelligent, agent-powered workspace where you can build, test, and deploy solutions using natural language. You really need to see it in action to understand how powerful it is, so check out the video for this episode, where we have a demo for you.
Setup with Agentforce is also now generally available (GA). This tool simplifies so much about managing users, configuring your org, and troubleshooting user access issues. Jen’s found it to be especially helpful for reorganizing role hierarchy and, in general, taking control of permissions in your org.
Jen highlights three Flow enhancements that she thinks will have a big impact for admins:
Edit History allows you to review, restore, and reuse past versions of a flow. If you’ve ever found yourself staring at a broken flow and asking yourself why you can’t just go back to a version that worked, this enhancement is for you.
Also new in Winter ‘27, you can now process multiple records with Screen Flows from List Views and Related Lists. This makes it easier than ever for your users to do bulk updates with a quick mass action, without having to leave the screen flow they’re already working in.
Finally, Test Mode (Beta) allows you to debug and test in Flow Builder in one place. You can save manual tests so you’re not entering the same criteria over and over again, and use them to build an automated testing suite.
The wonderful thing about Salesforce is that a new release is always around the corner. For Jen, release readiness comes down to four steps:
The good news is that by reading this post, you’re already doing step 1. So my advice is to pick one new feature for this week’s episode and spend some time exploring it. As admins, we learn so much more when we get our hands dirty and start building.
Make sure to listen to my full conversation with Jen for more highlights from the Winter ‘27 Release. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch a new episode every Thursday.
Mike Gerholdt:
Welcome to the Salesforce Admins podcast, this week I’m joined by Jennifer Lee to walk through Winter ’27 Release readiness, including Builder Central setup with Agentforce Flow and some of the features that admins should be paying attention to after Dreamforce.
Now, hey, quick heads up, if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcast, there’s a video version of this episode over on our Salesforce Admins YouTube channel and this time it matters because we’re actually dropping demos and clips into the conversation. Now, don’t get me wrong, you’ll still get the full discussion right here but you’re going to miss out on some really fun stuff by not seeing the video one. So, go check out that video version on YouTube, let me know what you think, in the meantime, let’s get Jennifer on the podcast.
So, Jennifer, welcome to the podcast.
Jennifer Lee:
Thanks for having me.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. Well, it’s October, it’s post Dreamforce time which means we got to start paying two releases and you put out an amazing release readiness blog. We’ve also gone through Dreamforce, there’s been iterations of stuff being updated so I figured why not have Jennifer back on the podcast to talk about everything that we saw at Dreamforce, everything that was in the release and maybe, I think, some stuff that missed your blog or needs to be updated. Does that sound current?
Jennifer Lee:
Yes, that makes sense.
Mike Gerholdt:
Okay, perfect. Well-
Jennifer Lee:
And I had to get all dolled up for this episode.
Mike Gerholdt:
I know. It’s a video podcast so, for those of you listening on iTunes, there’s a video version of this over on YouTube where hint, hint, there will actually be GIFs and video demos to watch so stay tuned. Hopefully it turns out, it’s early, here we go.
First thing I want to talk about is one of the cool … There’s a lot of cool stuff that we launched at Dreamforce but Builder Central. It was right after the keynote with our Salesforce live content, it was featured in the admin keynote. I hadn’t had a chance to really play around with it until after Dreamforce which is now. You’ve had a chance to see it and interact with it but tell people about Builder Central if they skip past it.
Jennifer Lee:
All right. So, what Builder Central is, basically, it’s a tool where you go in and describe what you want. You can describe the app or the agent in plain language and then the build agent goes and does all these things and it creates this plan for you, describes all the requirements and then it goes and builds all the things and you can go in and preview the items and make tweaks to it. And then, when you’re ready, you can go, say, deploy from your sandbox to production.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yup. Yeah, it builds it. So, I talked to the PM just this morning, it builds it in a virtual environment because I had no … I was like, “How is it doing this thing? Is it changing stuff already?” He’s like, “No, it’s a virtual environment and it doesn’t change anything until you deploy.” Even in a sandbox, you deploy it. So, I used it, it was so cool. I think it was so cool because it’s just top of mind, you’re like, “Hey, could you give me this?” And, spoiler alert, I had it create a screen flow. Not that I can’t create screen flows, I can, it just takes me a little bit and Builder Central just cranked it out, no problem then it was like, “Hey, do you want to add this to a page?” and I said, “Yes.”
And then I could go back … The cool thing is then I could go back in and I could actually see the flow components that were built, to me that was like, “Ugh.” This is so much easier not because it’s building it for me, it is, but because now I can learn and go back and see what are the components I should have built as opposed to getting frustrated that I don’t know what the right thing is to build next.
Jennifer Lee:
Yeah. The great thing is, in that preview mode, you can go in and drill into the data model and you can actually see the things versus it just coming back and saying like, “Oh, I did these things for you and here’s just a list.”
Mike Gerholdt:
Right, yeah.
Jennifer Lee:
The fact that you can actually drill into it and look at it is really cool.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yup. And it doesn’t just duplicate stuff. It looks at your org and says, oh, well we have this, let’s integrate this. It really feels like, man, if I would’ve had that as a new admin, it would help me jumpstart all of the things that I need to build. And could you go over your skis building a little bit? You could but I think the onus is then on you to go back and learn all the things that it built and why it built it.
Jennifer Lee:
And I love that it puts that human in the loop piece, it just doesn’t just do it for you. You’re going in and you’re like, “Okay, this wasn’t quite right so I’m going to tweak this a little bit,” but, yeah.
Mike Gerholdt:
Right. It’s currently in beta, right?
Jennifer Lee:
Correct, correct. So, this is the time where folks can go in and just kick the tires and check it out.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, I can’t, I can’t wait. Actually, one thing we’re going to do so, if you’re listening to the audio version of this, jump over to YouTube because right now I’m going to put in a demo of Builder Central.
Okay. So, that was the demo that the PM team put together of Builder Central, I think it’s really cool, it’s also the demo they showed in the connected content. It only begins to scratch the surface, I think this is the strongest V1 product I’ve seen us come out with in terms of just admins having a superpower. It needs a cape, Builder Central should get its own cape.
Jennifer Lee:
Let’s totally make one.
Mike Gerholdt:
I know. So, there’s a lot of other tools. Set up with Agentforce is one of them, let’s talk about that.
Jennifer Lee:
Yeah. So, folks, if you’re in my release notes blog, notice that I don’t nearly have as many of the setup with Agentforce features that are currently in the release notes so don’t come at me for that but let me just highlight a few that weren’t in my blog. So, Data 360 is no longer required so that’s great but do note that there are some specialized tasks such as, if you’re using related list enrichments and custom report types, that will still need Data 360 so just keep that in mind. They also streamline the enablement page so it’s easier to enable set up with Agentforce in your org and, previously, you needed to separately assign two permission sets to each user and now they bundle that in a perm set group. So, you just need to assign the perm set group and you’re all set to go with your users.
Mike, back in the day, I would’ve loved to have this and have an agent do this but now you could manage your users in bulk, you could freeze a bunch of users, unfreeze a bunch of users or specify here’s these users that need their password resets instead of doing it one by one by one because who has time for that.
Mike Gerholdt:
Period. Just that alone would make me happy.
Jennifer Lee:
Mm-hmm. So, for your profiles, you can go into the setup agent and you can say does this user profile have added access opportunities or which profiles have the customized application permission and it’ll come back and surface that for you like just asking an agent. You don’t even have to go through and click every single profile page, that’s time-consuming. So, with summarizing permission sets, permission set groups and having it surface up the information you need without having to, again, do those manual clicks. Another thing is, if you have a major reorg in your role hierarchy, you can just subscribe it to the agent and then it’ll just reorganize your role hierarchy for you. Can you imagine back in the day you have to manually row by row, yeah.
Mike Gerholdt:
I’m just thinking of, of all the parts of my Salesforce org that got the most stale, role hierarchy was it. You almost set it up and then you get elbows deep in building apps and onboarding users and role hierarchy is the first thing that gets out of date.
Jennifer Lee:
Yeah. And then one last feature I’ll mention for setup with Agentforce which I do mention in my blog is the org health and usage metrics dashboard. Now, we provide all sorts of metrics to you but now you can go in and say these are the ones that are important to me so I could favorite those and you can say these are the ones that I don’t care about and then they’re hidden so that you basically customize it to what’s important to you which is really cool.
Mike Gerholdt:
I like that. Was that in the admin keynote? I feel like a version of that was.
Jennifer Lee:
A version of that … So, I think you’re thinking of security center essentials.
Mike Gerholdt:
Oh, essentials, yup. Look at that, we have more than one tool for a thing.
Jennifer Lee:
Imagine that. So, should I continue on with a couple of other features for-
Mike Gerholdt:
Oh, please.
Jennifer Lee:
Okay.
Mike Gerholdt:
Because I think there’s other stuff that you wanted to talk about.
Jennifer Lee:
Yes, absolutely. So, in a record, when an owner leaves the company, you naturally will assign a new owner to that record. Now, if that record had any manual shares with it, those manual shares just evaporate into the ether when you assign it to a new user so then you’re going to have John Smith knocking at your door as an admin saying, “Hey, I had access to this record, now I don’t.” But in this release, you can go into sharing settings and then enable keep manual shares when transferring records and enable that checkbox. And then org-wide, once that happens, it will take that manual share and move it along to that new owner so you don’t lose any of that record access so that’s great.
Mike Gerholdt:
Oh, my God. Yeah, nobody keeps track of that.
Jennifer Lee:
Exactly.
Mike Gerholdt:
When a user asks another user, “Hey, can you share this?” and they click share, there’s no log for that.
Jennifer Lee:
Nope.
Mike Gerholdt:
Oh, man. And what’s crazy is you wouldn’t know it until somebody has to go to that record which could be eight months after a person left.
Jennifer Lee:
Right, right. And then you’re like, “Well, how did you get that access?”
Mike Gerholdt:
Right. What have you been snooping around on?
Jennifer Lee:
And then digging through the setup audit trail to figure it out, yeah.
Mike Gerholdt:
Oh.
Jennifer Lee:
Yeah, no.
Mike Gerholdt:
Just don’t set up audit trail into an AI and be like, “Help.”
Jennifer Lee:
Mm-hmm. Or you set up with Agentforce.
Mike Gerholdt:
Right.
Jennifer Lee:
So, another feature for reports is that now you can preview a record within the report and it doesn’t jump out of the report, you can preview it within the context of the report. Now, to use that, you need to enable it so you need to go to the reports and dashboard settings page and then there’s a feature called show record previews on lightning reports beta. So then, once you do that, when you’re in the report mode, you have to click on this little icon that looks like an eye and then you click on any of the record links and then they’ll open up in the side panel.
Mike Gerholdt:
That’s cool, wow. It’s been a while since I’ve built reports, that was probably the one thing I always tried to shy away from as much as possible.
Jennifer Lee:
Same.
Mike Gerholdt:
Thankfully, now we can just have Coworker build things for us, I don’t know. We would be remiss to … I’m surprised we’ve made it this far and haven’t talked about Flow. Everybody’s sitting here like, “You awesome, you have Jennifer Lee on the podcast and for 12 minutes you don’t talk about Flow.”
Jennifer Lee:
Well, I saved the best features for last.
Mike Gerholdt:
I know. I was going to say, right, you got to … Ironically, it’s why they put the milk at the back of the grocery store because everybody needs milk and they just want you to walk past the aisles of canned chili to get milk.
Jennifer Lee:
So, as always, kudos to the Flow team because, with each release, they’re rolling them out, there’s just a lot of them.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah.
Jennifer Lee:
I’m not going to possibly go through all of them, I’m just going to pick three that I’m going to highlight.
Mike Gerholdt:
Okay.
Jennifer Lee:
So, the first one is being able to review, restore and reuse past Flow versions. It’s 4:00 p.m. on a Friday, you’re looking at a Flow that’s broken and then you’re trying to figure out where it went wrong and who changed it and what happened, well, now you can go into the edit history when you’re in Flow Builder and you can see every single change that was made. You can see which elements were changed, you’re able to then restore to a previous version or copy the logic into a new Flow. So, that just really makes the troubleshooting and whatever changes you need to make so much easier instead of back in the day where I had different versions of flow and trying to figure out is this different, is this not?
Mike Gerholdt:
All of us did.
Jennifer Lee:
Crazy.
Mike Gerholdt:
I know. And the number of times that I would have to ping Jennifer Lee and be like, “Why doesn’t this Flow do this thing?” And she’d be like, “Because you didn’t check a box,” ugh. Just go back to the version that worked before I broke things. What else can we do in Flow?
Jennifer Lee:
Well, on Screen Flows now. So, from a list view or related list, you can check the records so check the records and then specify the Flow action and then that will take those selected records and process them in bulk. So, instead of having, for example, you’re on one record and you’re clicking a Screen Flow or autolaunched flow and having it processed for that one record, you’re on a list view and you’re like, “Okay, well, I want it to happen to these multiple records so I’m just going to select them,” and, boom, it just happens for all of them instead of having, again, to go one by one by one. So, this is something I’m really excited about because I wish I had this when I was back as an admin way back when.
Mike Gerholdt:
I could imagine.
Jennifer Lee:
Because I told my users, sorry, you have to do it one by one, can’t put it on a list view.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, nope. We have some stuff in beta for Flow as well, right?
Jennifer Lee:
Yeah. So, the last thing I’m going to talk about is Test Mode which is in beta. So, in Winter ’27, when you’re building your Flows, you’re going to have a little build tab and then a test tab and all your testing and debugging is now going to be in one place which is great. And so, there are a bunch of features that come with Test Mode. So, when you’re working through a Flow and you’re having to iterate through and test and test and test, know that now you could save that manual test so you’re not entering the same criteria for your records over and over again, you save it and then you just reuse that. So, there’s a lot of reuse so that’s great for as you’re building a Flow.
And then, when you’re ready to activate it, you don’t want to lose any of that test so then you could promote it to become an automated test where you have assertions. So, assertions are a developer term but essentially what it means is you test for something that is positive. So, if your Flow creates a task, you want to test that as part of your process, a task was created. So, the great thing about automated tests is, once you built them, it’s there forever so then, when you go and test your Flows, when you make a change to it, you want to then go and test to make sure nothing breaks, you don’t have to manually test them, you can now go and say, “Oh, I want to run this entire suite of tests for this one given flow or I just want to run these couple,” and it does it for you. You don’t need to manually go in and manipulate records, it just remembers it.
Now, another thing is if you have Flows that call another Flow or maybe you have an HTP call out, when you do your testing, you want to isolate those other pieces because those would’ve been tested elsewhere, you don’t want to test an integration every single time and a subflow would’ve been tested in and of itself so you want to isolate those out and really focus on the main flow. So, now you can do that with specifying mock outputs for your actions and subflow elements. And then, lastly, when you’re testing records, there are records that aren’t easily searchable. So, examples would be case or campaign but you know the record ID so you have the option now, instead of searching for a record, if you have that record ID, you can pace either that 15 or 18 character ID and then use that to test your Flows.
Mike Gerholdt:
Ooh, that’s easy, I like that.
Jennifer Lee:
Yeah.
Mike Gerholdt:
You could keep some record IDs around to test against all the time.
Jennifer Lee:
Mm-hmm.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, those are cool. It’s funny, Flow testing to me is still creating it in a sandbox and going to a record and trying to make it work as opposed to properly running the test, I don’t know. It’s like, “Come on, please, screen, I like this.” That’s really cool. I feel like a lot of the release this time was solving things that we were willing to work around but it’s made it so much easier, all of the testing, all of the bulk updates. Bulk updates, I don’t want to sound old but I remember having 12 workflows in an org and thinking, boy, that’s a lot and now how many flows per object aren’t people trying to manage and test and iterate on and fix and update, the same with users so I think that’s really cool.
One thing that’s different about when you become a Salesforce admin is really getting used to, hey, releases are coming and the cool thing is you don’t have to do anything, you can just chill out. I remember I had a user once ask me something, they were like, “What are you doing this weekend?” I was like, “Oh, this and that, I’m going to write a blog post and Salesforce has a release coming so our instance won’t be available from 2:00 a.m. to 3:00 a.m. or something.” And they’re like, “Oh, do you have to be up during that time?” I was like, “Nope, sure don’t have to worry about it.” But you have to prep and I think that’s something new for me when I got started as an admin.
So, tell me a little bit more, help people understand, do we have some stuff that they can help get ready or what should they do? Because I’ll link to it in the show notes and include it with this blog post.
Jennifer Lee:
Yeah. So, we have best practices for getting ready for a release. So, with this release, I went through and took a look at the blog post that I wrote in 2022, it seems like a long time ago.
Mike Gerholdt:
Oh, wow.
Jennifer Lee:
So, a lot of the same concepts still apply but I added a few new things or things that you should be aware of. So, I freshened that blog post up and then I also recorded a new video. So, depending on what method you’re better at learning, whether it’s reading through a blog or watching a video, you’re still going to get the same type of content. So, essentially it comes down to four foundational steps, I have plan and learn, get hands-on, tests, and there are different levels of testing, and communication, communication within the team that’s building Salesforce as well as your users.
So, within that plan and test section, I do really … That’s the biggest of the four steps and I talk about sandbox strategy and how that’s important and why you need both a preview sandbox and non-preview sandbox and here are the reasons why you would use each one and things to consider and also talk about the different levels of testing as well. So, whether you’re a new admin, just getting started, that releases happen throughout the year and they’re going to happen whether you’re ready or not. So, I recommend either reading the blog, watching the video and just knowing what you need to think about to get your org and your users, your team ready for a release.
And then, if you’re a seasoned admin, sometimes you just need a refresher. You’ve been doing it for a while, you might pick something up that you’re like, “Oh, yeah, I forgot about X, Y and Z.” So, yeah, take a look, we’ll have it in the show notes, either the blog and the video.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. No, I think it’s a really good point is sometimes you take things for granted. I think for me it was always the sandbox refresh schedule. What do I need to refresh now for current, to stay current and to make sure that I’m doing both? And so, yeah, if you’re not used to it, it’s a new thing and, if you are, this is really good because it helps you, oh, maybe you forgot about this and got to pick it up so this is great.
Jen, your mega blog, everybody loves it, we love that you publish it, I’m glad that you pour through the release notes for everybody. And thanks for coming on the podcast and updating us on some stuff but also walking us through what was really cool with all of the AI that we launched at Dreamforce and, of course, Flow because Flow, right?
Jennifer Lee:
And speaking of AI, so this time around I had AI help me through the process.
Mike Gerholdt:
Oh, oh.
Jennifer Lee:
So, I trained it, yeah. So, instead of me combing through all 600 plus pages, I told Claude, I fed the release notes into Claude and I said here are the sections that I care about, focus around admin but also, if it’s in that category and you don’t think it’s applicable for admin, still list it so I see it. So, I didn’t have to review everything, I saw what Claude returned and then I looked through the list of the things that it didn’t think applied to admins and there were some that I’m like, “Oh, well, not necessarily directly but they should be aware of it,” so I did that human in the loop piece where I’m like, “Okay, I’ll pull these things back in because I think it’s relevant.” So, it did speed up the process so I highly recommend it to use it to customize your release notes.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. Dealing with large amounts of data, that’s what AI does really well and I don’t know if ever I’ve read all the release notes.
Jennifer Lee:
No.
Mike Gerholdt:
But to have a tool, any tool just at least give one pass of a filter and you can accept or reject its ideas but at least it’s got you … Feed it the release notes, go grab a sandwich, 20 minutes later, hey, it’s got a pass on 600 pages for you, now you know what to pay attention to. I think that’s a great tip. So, thanks for coming on the podcast and helping admins out for this release.
Jennifer Lee:
I always love being on here.
Mike Gerholdt:
Well, that was a lot to cover and I think my biggest takeaway from this conversation is just how much easier some of these new features are going to make our lives as admins, whether it’s Builder Central helping you build faster, set up with Agentforce cutting down on repetitive tasks or some of those improvements in Flow, there’s plenty to explore. And a big thanks to Jennifer Lee for joining me and walking us through everything, be sure to check out her Winter ’27 mega release readiness blog along with the other resources that we have linked in the show notes.
And you know what? Here’s my challenge to you. Pick one feature we talked about today and spend some time exploring it because reading about new features is one thing but figuring out how it could make a difference in your org is where the fun really begins. I’m Mike Gerholdt. We’ll see you next week in the cloud.
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