In this episode of Salesforce Simplified we’re talking with Salesforce Ben’s Courses & Community Director Christine Marshall about some of her favorite new things inside Salesforce’s Spring ‘23 Release.
In addition to her Salesforce Ben duties, Christine is a 7x Salesforce-Certified Evangelist, who also serves as a Salesforce Admin Group leader and has been named – several times – as a Salesforce MVP.
Announcer:
Thanks for stopping by. This is “Salesforce Simplified,” the podcast from Ad Victoriam Solutions.
Mike Boyle:
Well, hello, everyone and Happy New Year… welcome to 2023. I’m Mike Boyle from Ad Victoriam Solutions. This is the “Salesforce Simplified” podcast and we’re speaking today with Salesforce Ben’s Courses and Community Director, Christine Marshall, about some of her favorite new things that are inside Salesforce’s Spring ’23 Release… Now, in addition to her Salesforce Ben duties, Christine is a 7x Salesforce certified evangelist, who also serves as a Salesforce admin group leader, and has been named numerous times as a Salesforce MVP.
Happy New Year, Christine. Welcome back to the “Salesforce Simplified” pod, as the kids call it today. How are you?
Christine Marshall:
Happy New Year, Mike, and thank you so much for having me back. I’m great, and really excited to talk to you today.
Mike Boyle:
Well, I appreciate your time, Christine, and appreciate everything that we’re able to do with Salesforce Ben. s
So, let’s talk about this Spring ’23 Release… I know that you have spent some time going through it… and actually, before I get into the questions, I wanted to ask you is there is special way that you attack these when you go through the releases? Do you have a special way that you go about doing it or you just kind of dive right into it.
Christine Marshall:
Well, what I normally do is I go and look for my favorite features or the features that I know are hot right now, and the ones that are being updated with every single release. So, I’m the first to go out and take a look at anything dynamic, anything to do with flow, anything to do with reports and dashboards. And then I go back and I go through everything else, and as you probably know, there are a lot of updates in every release.
Mike Boyle:
Oh yeah, and you have called out seven specific ones for us today. So, let’s dive into it. The first one is “Migrate to Flow for Process Builder.” Tell us about that one…
Christine Marshall:
I’m really excited about this one. So, as hopefully everybody is aware, Salesforce are retiring Workflow Rules and Process Builder, and that’s been in the pipeline for a little while, and they’ve been slowly releasing new tools and features to help us move to Flow Builder, which is the most amazing tool. It really straddles between declarative and underneath its more like a developer tool. It’s incredibly powerful and as part of the migration we’re going to need to move our Workflow Rules and our Process Builders into Flow. And one of the ways that they want to support us is by providing a migrate to flow tool. Now that’s been there for Workflow Rules for quite some time, but it’s also now going to be available for Process Builder from 2023.
Mike Boyle:
Number 2 on our list is “Dynamic Forms for Leads and Cases”… What’s inside that one?
Christine Marshall:
So, Dynamic Forms is my favorite Salesforce feature. I’ve been so excited about this ever since its release a few years ago because it really changes the way that we build page layouts, creating intuitive and responsive pages with fields and sections that can appear and disappear. Based on the logic that we set now, Dynamic Forms was fabulous, but it was only available for Custom Objects for a very long time. Now, back in the winter release, it became available for Accounts Contacts and Opportunities and then in spring it’s going to be available for Leads. And Cases, this is amazing because initially Cases was due in summer ’23, but they’ve worked so hard and they’ve brought it forward, so Leads and Cases available in spring.
Mike Boyle:
The word dynamic is used quite a bit in this particular release, so number three on our list of things that you’re calling out for Salesforce Spring ’23 is “View All for Dynamic Related Lists.” What can folks expect from that one?
Christine Marshall:
That’s it… dynamic is the buzzword of the moment and we have a lot of different dynamic features and I love them all. They are a suite of different features put together by Salesforce and Dynamic Related List was a new feature in 2022 and it takes your Related Lists and it makes them a new component and again you can set to make it appear to disappear, you could set filters. So, a great example of this was you might want to say on an Account Record, look at a related list and show me my open Opportunities, only show me a Related List that is my closed Opportunities only… just really really powerful stuff. However, the poor Salesforce product team behind this feature got an awful lot of flak for it because there was one thing that was missing that everybody really wanted and that was a view all feature. So, when you look at a Related List, you see a preview number of Related Records. But you might have 30, 40, 50 Related Records and there was no view all option. So, again, they’ve worked super hard and they are releasing that view all link in spring and I know that this is going to mean that so many more people are now going to be able to use this feature.
Mike Boyle:
We’re going to hang on to our buzzword one more time here, Christine… Number four on the list is “Dynamic Actions for Standard Objects.” Tell us about that one…
So I promise this is the last dynamic feature that I want to tell you about today, but Dynamic Actions work very similar to Dynamic Related Lists and Dynamic Forms in that you can make actions appear and disappear based on the criteria that you choose. You could have an action appear only when it’s relevant to your users. It’s a great way to declutter your pages, but previously it was only available for Account Case Contact Lead and Opportunities, but now Dynamic Actions are going to be available for all Standard Objects.
Mike Boyle:
Number five on our list, Christine, sounds really interesting to me: “Build Custom Forecast Pages with the Lightning App Builder.” What’s inside that one?
Christine Marshall:
Absolutely… and if you take a look back at the last couple of releases, you might have noticed that we’ve seen quite a lot of updates to forecasting in Salesforce. Now, I would say this is one of the most underutilized features out there. It comes as a standard part of Sales Cloud. And lots of people don’t use it and historically that’s been because it was a little bit clunky and it wasn’t customizable enough, but there is an incredible team working on this behind the scenes and I’ve been very fortunate enough to have met with them several times and discussed the current enhancements going on. One of them is this new feature that allows you to build a custom forecast page in Lightning and it means that you can create a far more user, friendly and intuitive page. You can use Standard and Custom Components and you can also create and assign different layouts for different users. It’s got a great look and feel to it and I think it’s going to really encourage our Sales users to get on-board with forecasting and Salesforce.
Mike Boyle:
That does sound interesting… Number six is “Import Contacts with Contacts and Leads with a Guided Experience.” What’s inside that one?
Christine Marshall:
So, I think this is a really, really interesting update, and one that makes me a little bit nervous because it means users will be able to import Contacts and Leads. So, our typical data importing tools, the Data Import Wizard or the Data Loader, traditionally was really only used by Admins and Developers and they are very powerful because they can affect your data. You are putting information into your system and as a lot of people will be aware, there’s a lot of data manipulation and management and cleansing of that data before we let it get into our Salesforce Org. But there’s this brand new feature coming in Spring ’23 and what it means is you’ll switch on basic Data Import in Salesforce setup and it enables a new feature for users of Sales Cloud and it works like a guided wizard to allow users to import Leads and Contacts, So, that’s great. It should relieve some of the burden of the Salesforce Admin, but hopefully those users will make sure they import clean data.
Mike Boyle:
Number 7 on our list that we’re talking about today in the Spring ’23 Release features that you’re calling out is called “Track Field History for Activities,” and something tells me this is something people have wanted for a while…
Christine Marshall:
Absolutely… So, Activities, Tasks, Events… those are legacy Objects. They’ve been around since the sort of start of Salesforce pretty much, and sometimes that can mean that they don’t get all of the latest enhancements. And one of the things that’s been missing for a long time is the ability to track your Field History, which we can do on Accounts and Opportunities on our Custom Objects. It means that we can track our Fields and see what changes were made, who made them, and when they made those changes. Really, really important for good data and being able to see our information in Salesforce and we haven’t been able to do that on Activities. But now we can and the only limitation to mention is it’s only up to six fields.
Mike Boyle:
I’m sure you’re still digging into these others. There’s probably a whole lot still more to digest, correct?
Christine Marshall:
Oh, absolutely, that is really just the tip of the iceberg. It was an amazing release. It is jam-packed full of amazing new updates.
Mike Boyle:
Well, Christine, I want to thank you for joining us today to talk about the Salesforce Spring ’23 Release. I’m looking forward to having you come back to talk about another release in the future. Can we book you now for that?
Christine Marshall:
Absolutely, I would love to I’ll see you again for Summer ’23.
Mike Boyle:
Wonderful, I look forward to it… and by the way folks, please, if you don’t know about Salesforce Ben, where the heck have you been? First of all, check out salesforceben.com for everything related to Salesforce. There’s so much knowledge, so much that you can gain just going there on on a daily basis. I highly encourage you to sign up for their daily email reminders about the articles that Christine and Ben and Lucy and the whole staff put together. It’s it’s a wonderful Salesforce resource. I will put some links in this show’s notes, too.
Salesforce Ben and Christine, and staff have already started writing some extensive articles about the Salesforce Spring ’23 Release… again Christine, thanks! Look forward to having you back.
Christine Marshall:
Thank you, Mike.
Mike Boyle:
And to the audience, if this is the first time you are listening to our podcast, I would be extremely grateful if you’d consider giving us a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. In both of those applications you’ve got to dive deep into the actual listings of all of the shows to do that. So, if you do that, I’d appreciate it and you can also subscribe to the podcast anywhere that you get a podcast…
I’m Mike Boyle from AdVic. Thank you for listening to the “Salesforce Simplified” podcast. Our next episode is just around the corner.
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