Mike Boyle:

Number four on our list is just simply called “Permissions.” There’s something there behind the curtain, tell me about that…

Christine Marshall:

Permissions is huge and it is going to be huge for the next couple of years.

So, we’ve had a record number of updates to Permissions in this release. And the reason for that is the impending retirement of Permissions on Profiles.

So, historically, I think most admins would agree that managing Profiles on Permissions is quite time consuming. It’s quite difficult. It’s not always obvious what you need to do.

And Cheryl Feldman, who now works at Salesforce, was well aware of this issue. And herself and her team have worked so hard over the last couple of years to start working towards retiring permissions on profiles and moving them into Permission Sets. It’s a huge task and to support that they keep releasing numerous updates to Permissions.

So, I’ve got a couple to share with you from the Winter ’24 Release.

So, the first one is that you will be able to report on Custom Permission Sets and Permission Set Group Assignments. So, that actually involves creating a Custom Report type using Permission Set Assignment as the Primary Object. And then you’ll be able to see all users assigned to a Custom Permission Set or Permission Set Group that’s going to be in beta, but that’s just gonna make it much easier to understand where you are.

Now, what you have on Permission Sets and Permission Set Groups, you will be able to see what’s enabled in a Permission set more easily. So, you’ll be able to display all enabled Objects, users Field Permissions on a single page that’s gonna make it much, much easier.

Now, some other things that we’ve got, you’ll be able to more easily troubleshoot Permission Set Groups. So, the most recent error will be displayed on the detail page and you’ll be able to manually trigger a recalculation. So, it’s gonna be much easier to troubleshoot your Permission Set.

And I’ve got two more for you, Mike, as I said, this bumper edition of Permissions, the Object API name and the Field API name will be displayed, which they weren’t before. And the reason that makes things tricky is we all know that we’re guilty of calling Fields and Objects by the same name. So, you can end up with multiple Fields called Amount or Multiple Fields called Account. And it’s very hard to see which one is included in a Permission Set, but no more, that’s gonna fix that problem.

And then lastly, we’ve got improved User Access Policies. So, they allow you to define access for groups of users in a single operation. From the Winter ‘24 Release, you’ll be able to reference a total of three Permission Sets, Permission Set Groups or manage package licenses in a User Access Policy Filter. So, it’s gonna make it much easier for you to look at your intended users for your User Access Policy.

Mike Boyle:

Very good. Before we get into our fifth one, Christine, I did want to ask you, as I always do, did you feel that there was any one theme, one road specifically that sales force was going down with the Winter ’24 Release?

Christine Marshall:

I think permissions is obviously a huge thing as we’ve just seen so many changes there. But overall, I would say the biggest theme in this release is probably to do with A I and GPT.

Now, I purposely don’t tend to cover that in these top release features for admins because a lot of those GPT features are extra or they’re not available to everyone just yet. But I noticed that there were some huge sections on different aspects of things like Einstein GPT, I think over the next year or two it’s going to be AI and Einstein GPT over and over again and we’ve been told to expect some really huge announcements at Dreamforce in September about Einstein GPT.

Mike Boyle:

Yeah, I think, I think you’re right. I think this time next year, that’s all we’ll be talking about.

We’re talking with Christine Marshall from Salesforce Ben – SalesforceBen.com. Please make sure you check that out. If you haven’t, if you’re not familiar, it’s a knowledgeable one, stop place to go to learn all things Salesforce. There’s terrific Salesforce-related articles and content helpful. The Get a Job section – and obviously near and dear to Christine’s heart is that Get Certified section… So, make sure you check out Salesforce Ben.

Number five, Christine, on our list for the Salesforce Winter ’24 Release is just titled “Forecasts.” What’s behind that one?

Christine Marshall:

So, this is another team at Salesforce who have been working tirelessly for a couple of years. Now, we first started to see lots of updates to Forecasts happening probably about two years ago. I noticed that forecasting, which hadn’t had a lot of updates in years and years, was getting all this new functionality and that is on purpose. There’s a whole team working on this at Salesforce and so we’ve got a couple of forecasting updates coming up in the Winter ’24 and now the first one is very, very simple and doesn’t really require any admin involvement. This is really for your users, but they’ve updated the Forecast page. So, it looks nicer, it’s much easier to understand the data on the page. They’ve done things like updated some of the labels to clarify them. They’ve highlighted certain things, they’ve had updated icons and highlighting indicates that are clickable. S, it just makes it easier and more intuitive for your users to actually use Forecast pages.

And then probably more exciting is there’s a new feature called Manager Judgments. So, we have a feature called “Adjustments” already. And this is when managers and also Opportunity owners can actually edit the Opportunity amount on the Forecasting page. Now that amount shows as adjusted on the Forecast page, but it doesn’t actually impact the Opportunity Record. So, if you had an Opportunity and you were forecasting a $50,000 deal, but actually you thought they were unsure about some aspects of it. So, it was more likely to be $30,000. You could adjust that in your Forecast to reflect $30,000 to give you a more accurate Forecast. So,we have that already…That’s great.

But they’ve added yet another way that we can get more accurate Forecasts. So, the Manager Judgment column, which you can add to your Forecast types allows managers to mark Opportunities in or out and it means that, you know – the VP of Sales or the Sales Manager, the Team Manager – can really bring their expertise and their knowledge. Sometimes that knowledge that’s not always quantifiable. They just have those kind of gut feelings and industry knowledge that something is likely to work out or it’s not and they can mark them in or out and it’s gonna give them again just a far more accurate Forecast.

Mike Boyle:

And the sixth and final Release Note here that we’re calling out – you’re calling out – for Salesforce’s Winter ’24 Release has kind of a couple of things going on. It’s titled “Intelligence View for Leads and Contacts.”

Christine Marshall:

Yes… So, this is very exciting. This might actually be my favorite new feature, especially for admins who are always looking for ways to get more user adoption and user engagement.

So, what this actually means is when you go on the Lead tab or the Contact tab, traditionally that just has a List View, we love List Views, they’re great. But now you’re also going to get something called the Intelligence View and that Intelligence View gives you at a glance of metrics about the Leads or Contacts that you’re looking at. So, for example, these metrics include the total number of records that meet your filter criteria. So, perhaps you’ve filtered on Contacts in San Francisco, you’re gonna see the total of those records with no completed activities. We know that there’s a correlation between Activities and securing deals. So, that’s an important metric to record with past activity, but no completed activity in the last 30 days. So, perhaps things have gone a bit stale in those relations, records with recently completed activity, but no future activities, scheduled records with activities that are overdue or due today or records with activities due in the next 30 days.

So that’s both leads and contacts that you get those metrics on. And I think that’s going to be so helpful to our sales users to help them at a glance, understand where they need to take action. So, they can be proactive and less reactive.

Mike Boyle:

Well, that’s just six things that are inside the Salesforce Winter ’24 Release… a lot more to digest. And in this episode, show notes, I’ll be sure to put a link there so you can read all of the Release Notes for Winter ’24.

Christine, A pleasure as always. Thank you for taking the time and joining us today to talk about what’s going on in the Winter ’24 Release. I’m looking forward to having you back – I guess in early January to go over the sales force Spring ’24 Release, It’ll be here before we know it… Have you started your holiday shopping yet, Christine?

Christine Marshall:

You know, you’re gonna laugh, but I have Mike, I’ve bought two holiday presents already.

Mike Boyle:

I’m not laughing at you because I have to stick my hand up and go… I have as well.

Thank you so much, Christine, I really appreciate you being here.

Christine Marshall:

Thank you for having me, Mike. 

Mike Boyle: 

And to the audience, if this is your first time listening to our podcast, we just say thank you. I hope you’ve found it a valuable use of your time, the podcast available anywhere that you get podcasts. Plus, we’re also available now on the new YouTube Music website and iOS and Android apps… Check it out there when you can.

I’m Mike Boyle from Ad Victoriam Solutions. Thank you for listening to the Salesforce Simplified podcast… Our next episode is just around the corner.

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