Our 7 Favourite New Features From the Spring ’22 Release Notes
The Salesforce Spring ‘22 release is coming closer and closer. After having enabled pre-release orgs last week, Salesforce is now treating us to the accompanying release notes. For some, these notes are a precious gift that requires meticulous pouring over and unwrapping. For others, they’re the devil’s work and they long for the days that Salesforce provided a 5 minute video version of the notes.
If you fall in the latter category, we’ve got you covered. We hand-crafted a little smorgasbord of the features that caught our attention, so that you can casually drop one or two around the coffee machine and impress your colleagues with the depth of your knowledge.
You may be surprised that some amazing features, such as ‘Define the Run Order of Record-Triggered Flows for an Object’ and ‘Filter Items into a Collection in Flow Builder’ didn’t make it to this list. Don’t let that fool you, we’re super stoked about these, but you’re going to find them in almost every other release notes write-up, and we wanted to focus on other topics.
Enough jibber-jabber, let’s dive in!
This is not exactly new information, but it’s good to repeat it so this doesn’t escape your attention. Starting in February 2022 all Salesforce customers are contractually obligated to use MFA for direct and SSO logins to Salesforce products.
Notice how we highlighted ‘contractually’? It’s important!
From the notes:
“Now it’s easier to search for and filter users to assign to permission sets and permission set groups. And with Lightning list views, you can better manage expiration dates for those permissions.”
This beta-feature immediately stood out to us. You can now set expiration dates on Permission Sets and Permission Set Group assignments. A user needs temporary access to some critical security feature? Assign the Permission Set and have it expire the day after. Great!
Speaking of critical permission assignments:
The Salesforce Optimizer report will now include Critical Permissions Assignments. Useful if you want to keep track of who has which critical permission assignments or audits.
Finally! This is a release update, meaning that you need to go to Release Updates in Setup to find it, but it’s one we don’t mind digging around for. Seriously, we’ve lost track of the number of times we asked “why oh why can’t we restrict Product access without using Pricebooks?”.
Slack is love, Slack is life. If you don’t know or use it yet, you should be ashamed (ok, maybe not ashamed, or maybe a little). After Mulesoft, it’s one of the biggest acquisitions Salesforce made, and it’s central to the Digital HQ that Salesforce wants to build. One small but significant step in that direction is enabling Slack as an SSO-provider, meaning that users can login to Salesforce using their Slack credentials.
This is the odd one out in this list because most people won’t care but, for personal reasons, this is the one I am the most excited about. If Slack is life, Mulesoft is Nirvana and dataweave is Mulesoft’s data transformation library. It will enable apex developers to wrangle file formats and data types more easily, and the number of uses I can think of only grow larger the longer I think of the possibilities. It’s a pilot feature, meaning that you’ll have to contact your account executive if you want in on the pilot, so that’s just what we’ll do.
This one turned out to be a whole lot less exciting than we initially thought, but we included it because we’re confused by it.
The release notes say that:
“Now you can access your most frequently used elements from the top of the Add Element menu. When you create a record-triggered flow, add a preconfigured Update Records element that updates fields on the triggering record or an action that sends an email using an email alert. Shortcuts are available only for record-triggered flows in auto-layout mode.”
The thing that confused us is the part in bold. It would be amazing if Salesforce somehow managed to unearth which elements you use most in your Flows, but that seems improbable. So from what we actually see and read, we think this is just Salesforce’s way of deciding for you that Update Triggering Record and Send Email Alert are your favorite actions. We’ll keep an eye on this one.
That’s it! Have any favourite features that you missed in this list? Let us know!
We look forward to spending some time with these features in the new year, but before we do that, we’re first going to spend some time with our family and friends. See you all next year!