On April 27th Salesforce hosted the keynote for TrailblazerDX ‘22 where it announced a slew of new features for the platform. We’re pretty excited to present our favorite new features, and if you’re a point-and-click admin, a developer, an integration architect or a Slack enthusiast, we hope you’ll be just as thrilled as we are. We picked our 5 favorites of what we learned so far.

1. Trailblazer.me changes

The trailblazer profile is what a lot of Salesforce professionals use as a public resume. It’s a unified view of someone’s skills, certifications and achievements on the platform. The announced changes are not exactly groundbreaking stuff, but they’re a very welcome treat for those working in the ecosystem.

First off, we’re finally getting new Trailblazer Ranger Ranks. For a long time, Ranger was the highest rank you could achieve, but this is about to change with the introduction of starred Ranger ranks.

Secondly, ecosystem certifications will be added to the profiles. This means your hard-earned Slack, Mulesoft and Tableau credentials will now be proudly displayed next to your existing Salesforce certifications.

Lastly, users will be able to add community tags to their profiles. These tags let you highlight the communities you’re part of and will visualize your career persona. It’s a bit gimmicky, but it looks fun.

2. Salesforce Platform for Slack

• Sales Cloud for Slack automates deal status updates to sales teams, maintains up-to-date records in Salesforce to feed pipeline analytics, and makes it easy to collaborate in real time across teams to close deals faster. 
• Service Cloud for Slack automatically assigns service cases to team members as they come in, and makes it simple to bring in the right experts to solve customer cases efficiently.
• Marketing Cloud for Slack enables teams to quickly collaborate and execute on marketing campaigns. With Account Engagement for Slack, sales teams are automatically alerted in Slack when leads are generated, helping sales teams quickly engage prospects and close more deals.

The Apex SDK will be available in pilot in June 2022 and is expected to become GA in february 2023. Sales Cloud for Slack, Service Cloud for Slack and Marketing Cloud for Slack in Beta right now and are expected to become generally available in June 2022. You can read more about it here.

3. Salesforce Flows in Slack

FLOWS! IN SLACK!

This is what I’m most excited about. Not only is Flow getting standard Slack actions that will let you create channels or add team members to channels straight from Salesforce, you’re going to be able to bring your screen Flows over to Slack. Let me make sure you got that: you are going to be able to build guided Flows in Salesforce and you will be able to run these Flows straight from Slack. And the best of all? All you have to do is check a single box to make that happen.

Now, there are obviously going to be limitations to this, so I’m not expecting more advanced screen flows that use custom components to be supported as well, or at least not straight away, but even then, this opens a whole lot of exciting new possibilities and I’m looking very much forward to get my hands on this.

4. New Lightning App Builder Features

This part wasn’t part of the keynote, but came to our attention via Twitter user @baizman. There seem to be some changes incoming that will make a lot of people really happy. Beware though, these haven’t officially been announced, but they are part of the roadmap. First of all, Dynamic Forms are coming to Account, Contact and Opportunity in Winter ‘23. While Page Layouts won’t be going away anytime soon, it’s nice to see the features of Dynamic Forms expanded to these core objects as well. The same roadmap picture also shows that these can be expected on Lead and Case around the Spring ‘23 release.

What will be part of the Summer ‘22 release are Dynamic Related Lists. We couldn’t find a detailed explanation of what this will do exactly, but as we understand, it will allow you to add filtered related lists to  Lightning pages.

5. Salesforce & Anypoint Code Builder

Salesforce Code Builder hasn’t made a lot of appearances since its original announcement in 2020. The Code Builder was supposed to be a fully functional Salesforce IDE running in a browser. It’s been in pilot since 2021, and as far as we know, there has been no news about it becoming generally available yet. What we did get, however, is an announcement that Mulesoft is making its Anypoint IDE available in browsers, using the same technology as the Salesforce Code Builder. The Anypoint Code Builder will be in Beta in the coming months and expected to be generally available in the second half of 2022. You can read the full release information here.

This is all just a selection of everything going on at TrailblazerDX. Yesterday was just the first day of the event, which will run for 2 more days. Should there come any other news out of it, we’ll be sure to update our post and let you all know.

If you want to watch a recap of the keynote, you can do so here. The remaining sessions will be livestreamed on Salesforce+, so you can tune in live there or catch up on them later. If you’re looking for the full list of sessions, we have you covered as well.

We’re looking forward to hearing what you think, so be sure to let us know!