Highlights From the Salesforce Summer ’24 Release
Episode Notes/Resources:
In this episode of Salesforce Simplified we’re talking with Salesforce Ben’s Technical Content Director Christine Marshall about some of her favorite new features inside Salesforce’s Summer ‘24 Release.
In addition to her Salesforce Ben duties, Christine is an 11x Salesforce-Certified Evangelist, a Salesforce Admin Group leader, and has been named – several times – as a Salesforce MVP.
Christine Marshall on LinkedIn
Bristol Salesforce Admin User Group
Salesforce Summer ‘24 Release Notes
Christine’s Salesforce Ben Article – 15 Hottest Salesforce Summer ’24 Features For Admins
Transcription:
Mike Boyle: [Singing] It’s summertime, summertime, summer… Oh, hi everyone.. Mike Boyle from Ad Victoriam Solutions. Sorry, I promise I won’t do that again to you [sing]. This is the Salesforce Simplified podcast. However, the subject is summer. We’re here today to talk about the Salesforce Summer ’24 release and our good friend from Salesforce Ben, Christine Marshall, has agreed once again to be with us and we’re so thrilled to have you back. Christine, welcome…
Christine Marshall: Thank you for having me, Mike. And it might feel like somewhere, but not here in the UK.
Mike Boyle: We were talking about that before we hit the record button here. Yeah, we hope one day you’ll get over 60 degrees in the sunshine, right?
Christine Marshall: It would be nice…
Mike Boyle: By the way, congratulations, Christine. Christine has gotten herself a little bit of a promotion here. She’s now the Technical Content Director at Salesforce Ben/SalesforceBen.com. What comes with that new responsibility, Christine?
Christine Marshall: Thank you, Mike. Well, as usual, I’m still responsible for our e-learning platform, SF Ben courses, but I’ve also taken on responsibility for the technical content on the main Salesforce Ben website. So making sure that we are producing really top-quality technical content for all Salesforce® professionals.
Mike Boyle: Well, there’s, no doubt about that. You guys crank out some really great stuff. I enjoy Ben’s, work and your work. And Lucy and Tim, I highly encourage everyone who’s not familiar with Salesforce Ben. And gosh, if you’re in this ecosystem, you need to be. You should be salesforceben.com dot. Make sure you check that out. By the way, Christine, your company, Salesforce Ben, and Ad Victoriam Solutions, we are both celebrating our 10th-year anniversaries this year.
Christine Marshall: Isn’t that crazy?
Mike Boyle: Yes, isn’t that crazy?
Christine Marshall: Time flies…
Mike Boyle: So happy anniversary to us… Well, before we get into the eight specific release features for Summer ’24 that you’re going to highlight here for us, talk to me as you always do after you’ve digested… any particular trend, any particular focus for Salesforce in the Summer ’24 Release?
Christine Marshall: I think we’ve got two things competing for the top spot at the moment and that’s anything to do with automation. So things like Flow Builder and then of course, as expected, plenty of Einstein action going on.
Mike Boyle: All right, well, those are going to take up the first couple for sure here that we talk about. The first one is “Manage Your Flows More Efficiently with the Automation Lightning App:… What’s in that one?
Christine Marshall: That’s right. So there is a new Automation Lightning App that you can access on Salesforce. So it’s going to act as the home for all things automation-related, users that have access to this new app will see flows, errors, and other community-based links from within the main application. And I think what’s really interesting about this is it’s the first time we’ve seen something like this outside of the setup menu. So it’s a really interesting move on Salesforce’s part to bring this part of setup, outside setup, and into an app. But it does provide a really nice, easy-to-use interface when you want to go and check out your automations.
Mike Boyle: All right, number two, “Let Einstein Build a Draft Flow for You.”
Christine Marshall: So I think this is absolutely amazing. As someone who is really honest about the fact that I find Flow Builder incredibly difficult, the fact that they are releasing Einstein for flow is amazing. So what it will do is it’s going to allow salesforce professionals to create flows based on a text prompt. So what you’ll do is you’ll simply describe your automation using natural language and then Einstein for flow will actually generate a draft flow for you. So what we might do is we would type in, I want to create a flow that sends a notification to sales representatives when a lead is converted to an opportunity. And then Einstein for flow is going to go and build that flow for me. If I’m unsure where to start, if I’m not that strong on what m is a natural language prompt that I can use, then that’s fine because Einstein for Flow also comes complete with some sample instructions to help. Now, once it’s generated that flow for you, you can then check it, and make sure you debug and test it. But it’s great because it’s really going to help people get started with flow much, much quicker.
Mike Boyle: I think this one, number three on the list, is going to make some people really, really happy. That’s “Fix Formula Syntax Errors with Einstein for Formulas.”
Christine Marshall: Again, another great Einstein feature that was released last year. So Einstein for Formulas previously would explain what formulas were doing for you. That’s great. So instead of having to go onto the answers community and ask good old Steve Moe what a formula was doing, Einstein could tell you instead. But even better, it will now give you formula assistance. So it will suggest fixes for your formulas that have syntax errors.
Mike Boyle: One of your favorite things to talk about is Dynamic Forms. Number four on the Salesforce Summer ’24 Release that Christine Marshall from Salesforce Ben is highlighting for us today is “Add New Custom Fields to Dynamic Forms Enabled Pages.”
Christine Marshall: So this probably sounds a bit more complicated than it is. It’s actually a very simplistic change, but one that has been asked for. So if we go back a step and we think about creating custom fields and the process for doing that, you would set up your field, choose the type, and then you would have the option in the wizard to assign it to a page layout. And that was great. But when Dynamic Forms came along, we didn’t have that same functionality. So you would have to go into your Dynamic Form and add those fields separately, which was just extra clicks and extra time for admins. So what happens now is you will create your custom field as usual and then follow the step to set field-level security. But there’ll be a new step to select which lightning record pages to add the new field to. And if you don’t have dynamic forms enabled, then that step simply won’t appear.
Mike Boyle: We’re going to stay with Dynamic Forms here for number five on the list… “Use Blank Spaces to Align Fields on Dynamic Forms-Enabled Pages.”
Christine Marshall: I know, who would have thought blank fields would be so, so exciting? But another thing that’s been requested, so people want more feature parity between Dynamic Forms and traditional page layouts. You can now add blank spaces to Dynamic Forms and this just means that you can make the page layout look visually more appealing. And then the only thing that I would say to note is that a blank space is considered a field and counts against the limit of 200 fields per, region on dynamic forms. But that’s just a little thing to consider, and I hope no one’s using 200 fields per region.
Mike Boyle: Hopefully not… Let’s go back to Lightning App for just a second for number six on the list and that would be “Set Conditional Visibility for Individual Tabs in Lightning App Builder.
Christine Marshall: Again, sticking with this concept of really dynamic pages and the Lightning Page Builder, you can now customize individual tab visibility and ah, make tabs conditionally visible based on the criteria that you choose. So why might you want to use this? Well, perhaps you only have a certain group of users that use chatter, for example, so you could hide the chatter tab. Or perhaps you only want to show a certain tab to your finance users, or your HR users, or your sales users, and so on. So you can apply component visibility to a tab and it just means it’s not there for the people that don’t need to see it, creating a clutter-free layout for them.
Mike Boyle: I’m really interested in this one… Number seven on our list, Christine, and I haven’t had an opportunity to dive into this yet but “See What’s Enabled in Permission Sets and Permission Set Groups,” which will be generally available in the Summer ’24 Release.
Christine Marshall: So this is Cheryl Feldman and her wonderful team at Salesforce. Now we probably talked about this on the podcast before, Mike, but they did announce that they were or they’re looking to retire permissions on profiles. Now originally that was scheduled to happen a lot sooner. They’ve actually delayed that happening, but it’s part of a bigger, project that’s going on and that is to make managing users’ permissions profiles permission sets much, much easier because as we all know, Salesforce security is really, really important and they want to make it easier for us to make sure that we are in control our security. So what they have given us this time is a way to more easily understand what’s included in a permission set or a permission set group. So there’s a new interface and it will display all enabled objects, users fields, and custom permissions on a single page.
Mike Boyle: Number eight on our list, the final one that you’re calling out for Summer ’24, Christine, is “Get a Summary of a User’s Permissions and Access”… Tell me about that one.
Christine Marshall: So in the same vein as being able to more easily understand what’s in a permission set or a permission set group, this helps you troubleshoot user permissions and access. So it’s a summary view and it will display various permissions and group memberships in another really easy-to-use view for a specific user. So if you want to know what they can see or why they can see something, you’ll be able to go into their user record and have this much simpler quick view to find out why.
Mike Boyle: Well, that was a quick eight in the Salesforce Summer ’24 Release from Christine. I will say people should check out your article on SalesforceBen.com, “15 Hottest Salesforce Summer ‘24 Features for Admins.” You’ll get much more. and as I mentioned earlier, Lucy and Tim, and Ben have written articles as well. So I highly encourage everyone to get to salesforceben.com to get the load down on the Salesforce Summer ‘24 Release. I will have links to those things I just talked about here in this show’s notes… Christine Marshall, the Technical Content Director at SalesforceBen.com, thank you so much for joining us. I can’t believe that we’ll be talking about Winter ’25 next.
Christine Marshall: I know, and not too long away.
Mike Boyle: We’re recording this in the Spring of ’24. We got to get through the Summer of ’24. And then in the late Summer/early Fall, we’ll talk about Winter ’25. So we look forward to having you back. Thank you, Christine.
Christine Marshall: Thank you, Mike.
Mike Boyle: And thank you, everyone, for listening to the Salesforce Simplified podcast, which we hope you’ll tell all your friends and colleagues about. Get us anywhere you get a podcast… Spotify, Apple… Help us out with a five-star review if you think Christine and I earned it for this one. Thanks so much… Mike Boyle from Ad Victorium Solutions, saying our next episode is just around the corner.
Speaker: We’re glad you stopped by. You’ve been listening to Salesforce Simplified, the podcast from Ad Victoriam Solutions.
