The Winter 2023 release notes are out and you’ll want to make preparations to welcome the items one or about October 15. I’ll try to share my install and configuration notes once the live release hits to help save all my small nonprofit friends some technical debt time.
1. Account, contacts and opportunities now support dynamic forms in beta. (Custom objects already have them.) If you haven’t tried out dynamic forms yet, it’s well worth it. Unfortunately it doesn’t work on mobile. I’m very reluctant to recommend features that aren’t fully supported, which I include all objects and all devices. Users increasingly use tablets and mobile phones. But if dynamic forms only on large screen devices work for you, then it’s now available.
2. View Custom Report structure as you select the report. This beta helps guide end users in this crucial step of report making! Helps to solve the number one report user problem: picking the wrong report type base. Another custom report selection feature new this cycle allows filtering reports by the fields they contain. Couple this with the Analytics Home and it’s getting easier for new and occasional users to be productive.
3. Mobile reports get better. Mobile reports are frustratingly different from desktop. This beta attempts to optimize without making reporting so different. We’ll see!
4. Flow Builder: Cut and past items. No longer do you have to switch to manual routing mode and rewire the items to move a section of elements! We also now have access to a modern formula builder with verification of the formula before you save. So much better! And we have more screen space for our designs in two ways. First, the resource toolbar on the left side of the flow builder screen is collapsible. Second, the screen editor with a much larger footprint in the pop-up window. When adding an element, the menu now has a search filter so you can get to those items down at the bottom without scrolling over and over.
5. Flow screen user experience: Changing input on the screen can now change visibility immediately of other elements on the same screen. Using these, you can build very nice User Experiences with flow, providing focus on only the fields that are relevant. The standard lookup component can now allow selecting multiple items. This reduces the need for user loops to do the same processing to several records. We now have a brand new Data Table component that can serve two purposes. It can display nice compact information from a set of records in flow. And it can provide a way to select one or more records from a selection, displaying several fields on each row to support differentiation and selection. I’ve been using an add-in data table component for a year or so and it’s been a game changer! Think of it as having a listview inside your flow for helping the user get things done quickly and intuitively.
6. Expanded Flow Power: Record triggered flow can no2 update related records much more easily and powerfully. We can now use sets to help us get records we need with an IN and NOT IN filter criteria on the get and update record operators.
7. Clone Lightning Apps. It’s no more a pain to create a duplicate app (from a managed set or from your own custom apps.) We use a “Beta” App to validate our user experience changes for our record and home pages seasonally and it’s a pain to create and copy all the pages and App. We’ll see if this helps.
8. Permission got more support. When you create new fields for a record you can now assign access to a permission set instead of a profile. I only configure users via permission sets these days so this is a welcome change for me! And a tool that has always been around (called Permission Helper) has a new name and appears on its way to being a regular setup tool. It allows management and analysis of permission sets. I look forward to configuration instructions for all tools to be worded in terms of permission sets instead of adding access to profiles.
I’m still not covering Slack because I never hear anything back from Salesforce when I inquire whether they or have they changed the SLACK policy that specifically religious nonprofits cannot receive a discount or free licenses provided for other types of nonprofits. I think this policy is not in light with Salesforce values, but it’s their product. I just won’t use it or promote it. When anyone is diminished, we all are.
I’m still saddened that the words nonprofit and NPSP return no values in the release notes. I haven’t yet seen any preliminary release notes for any of the many nonprofit products. Sadness that is only eclipsed by the fact that I can’t search Google for nonprofit product documentation any more without coming up with broken links.