In this episode of Salesforce Simplified we’re talking with Salesforce Ben’s Courses & Community Director Christine Marshall about some of her favorite new features inside Salesforce’s Spring ‘24 Release.
In addition to her Salesforce Ben duties, Christine is an 11x Salesforce-Certified Evangelist, who also serves as a Salesforce Admin Group leader and has been named – several times – as a Salesforce MVP.
Hi everyone, you found us. This is the Ad Victoriam Solutions “Salesforce Simplified” podcast and I’m Mike Boyle from Ad Victoriam Solutions. This episode is one that we’ve always looked forward to. It’s with our buddy Christine Marshall from Salesforce Ben… Christine, don’t tell anybody but you’re my favorite guest! Welcome back to the podcast… For those who don’t know, Christine is Salesforce Ben’s Courses and Community director.
Christine Marshall:
Thank you, Mike.
Mike Boyle:
She is also an 11-time Salesforce-certified evangelist…You didn’t get one overnight, did you? You didn’t slip one in there on me?
Christine Marshall:
Ah, no, no new ones, I’m afraid, since last time.
Mike Boyle:
Christine also serves as a Salesforce® admin group leader and has been named numerous times as a Salesforce MVP… Christine before we get into this stuff, is anything new going on at Salesforce Ben? You guys launched an exciting new website and you’ve got some really great content going on… How are things going?
Christine Marshall:
Things are going great at Salesforce Ben. We have loved our rebrand. I’m sure everyone will have noticed we’re very purple now, and November and December were very exciting times for us. Our courses platform I manage is going from strength to strength. We have recently hit over thirty-seven and a half thousand learners, so we’re absolutely thrilled to have so many people who are enjoying the content that we’re putting out.
Mike Boyle:
Well, there’s no doubt about that and it’s great to see you guys just continuing to grow and I thoroughly enjoy following you and Ben and Lucy… everybody. It’s just a wonderful resource – SalesforceBen.com, folks.
As I always do before we get into you calling out some of the features here from the upcoming Salesforce Spring ’24 Release, was there a specific theme or a direction that you saw in this release? I see a lot of the words “dynamic forms” and “flow.” What did you see?
Christine Marshall:
I would agree… I think Dynamic Forms is really coming into its own now. So we saw a lot of updates to Dynamic Forms and that’s to make sure that it’s ready. It’s been in our production systems for a few years but it’s always had these limitations that have prevented a lot of people from using it since they’ve deployed it to almost all standard objects. We’re now seeing a real flurry of activity around Dynamic Forms. So I think that for me this is one of the key things and also AI, there’s no getting away from AI. But I’m over AI!
Mike Boyle:
It’s the only thing that you see and there are other things going on in the world…
Christine Marshall:
Exactly.
Mike Boyle:
I mean AI is very important – we all agree – and it’s never going to go away but there are other things to think about… Okay, so let’s get into what you’re highlighting for the Spring ’24 Release… Number one on our list of five is “New Dynamic Forms with related Object Fields.” Talk to me about that one…
Christine Marshall:
So now when you use Dynamic Forms, you can display information from a parent record onto a child record. So previously, you would have needed to create a formula field or use a quick update action and display it on a Lightning page. But from the Spring ’24 Release, you’ll be able to add a field from another record onto your Lightning page as long as they have a relationship. It is very simple to do and you can dig across multiple relationships as well. So for example, you could go from an Opportunity to the Opportunities-related account to the parent account of that. So this is a great new edition for Dynamic Forms-enabled pages.
Mike Boyle:
And number two on our list says “Device Specific Salesforce Dynamic Forms. There’s those words, “Dynamic Forms,” again.
Christine Marshall:
Yep, sticking with a theme in the Dynamic Forms. Another critical update is that you can create visibility rules based on what form factor you’re using. So whether you’re using a mobile device or whether you’re on a desktop as well. So now that Dynamic Forms is mobile-enabled, it’s really important that you think about what these Dynamic Form pages look like on mobile and on the desktop because what works for one typically doesn’t always work well for the other.
All right and number three on the list is “Updated Analytics with Dashboard Ownership and Visualization.
Christine Marshall:
I have so many updates for you in analytics and I’m really excited about this because as I said, I am a bit over AI, as wonderful as it is, but I miss the simpler days of building reports and dashboards. So I was thrilled to see so many exciting new updates in Spring ’24. Now the first one is that you can now transfer Lightning dashboards, whereas before if a dashboard owner left the company, you had the hassle of cloning and recreating the dashboard. You couldn’t simply transfer it to a new owner. You’ll be able to do that from Spring ’24, and even better news, you’ll be able to bulk move them. So if somebody leaves your company, like an admin for example, who is the dashboard owner, you’ll be able to mass transfer those dashboards into the new system. Much easier and I think people are going to love this one.
Mike Boyle:
Oh, I can see people clapping now. That’s a great one!
Christine Marshall:
These next two features were rolled out for users of some more expensive editions previously and I was very sad that they weren’t coming to everyone. So the first one is the fact that you’ll be able to supercharge your dashboards with images, rich text, and dashboard widgets in all Salesforce editions. I think before it was made available to unlimited additional customers only, which I thought felt very unfair and it means you can really create visually stunning and informative dashboards. Very, very engaging and really simple for either an admin to create or a user. I think users will love it and I think we’ll get a resounding cheer for my next point which is that you can have up to five dashboard filters from Spring ’24. It was three before. This is one of those ideas – it’s been around for a long time – with people desperate for more dashboard filters but they’re finally releasing five filters for all editions. It was released to unlimited edition users in the Summer ’23 Release but now we all get to enjoy it.
Mike Boyle:
I see big, big smiles on people’s faces…
Christine Marshall:
And then just a couple more to finish off on analytics because I honestly think there is such a bumper addition in Spring and we need something in spring to cheer us up through these dark days… For the first time, you can easily update the fields in Lightning report filters. So when you’re building a report, typically if you wanted to change the field of a filter – if I was filtering on first name equals Dave – and I wanted to change it to last name equals Dave, I had to delete the filter and create a new one. Now I’ll be able to change it so I’ll be able to say I don’t want to look at my first name anymore, I want to look at my last name. So that’s a real time saver and another time-saving enhancement is that you’ll be able to rearrange multiple Lightning report columns at once. So this is something that you haven’t been able to do since Classic. But it means you can rearrange your report columns several at a time instead of doing it one by one. So again, another amazing timesaver. Such a simple enhancement, but one that will make admins so happy.
Mike Boyle:
And we’re up to number four on our list of features that Christine is calling out for the Salesforce Spring ’24 Release… This is “Updated Migrate to Flow Tool For Migration of More Processes.”
Christine Marshall:
So hopefully most people are well on their way to migrating their automations to flow. You can no longer create new workflow rules or process builders and so you should be building all your automations in flow and migrating any existing automations. To assist you, the migrate to flow tool now supports partial migration for most actions in process builders. So it means that you can migrate some or part of your process builder and not all which is a really great thing. Big time saver instead of having to migrate the whole thing and then unpick it So a nice little feature that will hopefully help people get to the finish line with this migration.
Mike Boyle:
And finally, number five is called “Seller Home for Improved Sales Experience.” What’s in that one?
Christine Marshall:
Well, we’re always looking for ways to increase user adoption or to get those pesky sales team members to actually use Salesforce, and Sell a Home is designed to help you with this. So it’s a new productivity feature. It’s very snazzy. I think Sales users are going to like it. And what it does is, it’s going to give them a new dashboard-like homepage and it will be the default homepage for the Sales console and sales engagement apps. It’ll appear automatically unless you’ve customized those pages but you can also manually enable it from setup. What it means is that when your Sales users log in, they’ll get a ton of useful information at a glance, so they’ll be able to see their opportunity overview and account overview. They can set weekly or monthly goals. They can quickly see today’s events or do items with recent records. And also contact suggestions. So a very nice central home place for your Sales users to help them increase their productivity while using Salesforce.
Mike Boyle:
And truth be told, Christine has actually called out a few other features in the Spring ’24 Release; she’s written an article about it and I’m going to put a link to that article at SalesforceBen.com in this show’s notes so you can delve further into this… Christine Marshall from Salesforce Ben, thanks, it’s always such a pleasure to have you with us. I can’t believe that we’re doing spring and before we know it, we’ll be doing the Summer ’24 Release Notes.
Christine Marshall:
Absolutely, it comes around so fast, Mike. I think I have to add you to my speed dial.
Mike Boyle:
Please do… use it, and abuse it as they say. Take care, Christine, a pleasure. Thank you so much…
Christine Marshall:
Thank you, Mike.
Mike Boyle:
And to the audience, if this happens to be your first time listening to the podcast, well, first of all, thanks for being here! We really appreciate it very much and would also appreciate a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, if we’ve done a good job, thank you! You can also subscribe to the podcast wherever you get a podcast… I’m Mike Boyle from Ad Victoriam Solutions. Thanks so much for listening to the “Salesforce Simplified” podcast… Our next episode is just around the corner.
Ad Victoriam Solutions
Ad Victoriam Solutions helps companies bridge the gap between technology and business insights for greater efficiencies. We can turn even the most complex problems into smart solutions that help businesses perform better and achieve more. We’re cloud and data experts who work across a spectrum of leading-edge applications and technologies to help companies solve critical IT problems - quickly, simply and efficiently.
