My Favorite Things in the Salesforce Winter ’24 Release

I knew I’d be playing with fire reading the release notes and attempting to write this blog the same week as Dreamforce. But when life gives you a conference you’re not attending, you turn that slow work week into blog lemonade!

As usual, this blog covers the core clouds and new capabilities that spark joy for me, and hopefully you too.

Since I cover an industry (public sector) I’m going to do something different and do a second post where I cover core industry products and public sector solutions in that post.

AI

I wouldn’t be a good Salesforce employee if I didn’t mention artificial intelligence (AI) in this blog.

First, if you want the 411 on the AI hype wagon – go here. It’s a gorgeous cheat sheet and tells you what you have regarding AI in your org right now. Since we’re in a bit of an arms race, many AI features are being released monthly instead of our three times a year cadence. You can see that list here.

Second, Salesforce Professional Services offers an AI Coach. It’s like having Mike Ditka in his prime! Instead of trouncing those Patriots, they’re gonna work on your org, just like Sweetness slashing through defenses. They’ve got three types of engagements: first, da readiness plan, like planning a route through Chicago traffic; then there’s da proof of technology, where they’ll run the plays and score like Gale Sayers in the end zone; and don’t forget da strategic discovery and planning, where they’ll draw up a winning game plan like the ’85 Bears on their way to the Super Bowl shuffle.

Now, you know, lots of folks wanna dive in headfirst like a Bears fan into a plate of pork chops, but these engagements here are gonna help you squeeze every bit of value from your current investment, make your AI game as strong as Ditka’s mustache game, and get you ready for all the latest and greatest capabilities. *

*The preceding two paragraphs were augmented by ChatGPT.

If you want to get in on the generative fun, you’ll need a $0 SKU that’ll give you credits. Then it’ll turn into consumption based pricing.

The big announcement of Dreamforce, Einstein Copilot, which includes prompt builder and skills builders will be in pilot starting February 2024. Pricing to be announced shortly.

But if in doubt about anything AI, go to the first link in this section, as that’ll be continually updated.

General

Setup is getting a new domain. Prepare by adding *salesforce-setup.com to your allowlists.
RIP News, Automated Account Fields, and Account logos.

Analytics

Slack shortcuts can be used for subscriptions and notifications
You can now run reports on where Slack subscriptions and notifications are sent. Kind cool.
In major news, you can now transfer ownership of dashboards (Beta). Previously if a user created a dashboard left your company, your dashboard was no longer going to work. Colleen – if you’re reading this – you have no idea how high and dry you left us when you left the company and all your dashboards stopped working. Wish we had this a few years ago 🙂 .

Pagination comes to tables in CRMA

A Dashboard Table with Disable paginated loading highlighted

Exploring multiple data model o b j e c t s in direct data is now GA. Basically one query can help you look at a few different data models.
Saving the best for last: themes are now available in CRMA dashboards. Instead of building Rome each and every day, a theme will give you that consistency instead of hoping your colors are close to the last dashboard you built. This is my kind of panis et circus.

Customization

If you spend any time on /r/salesforce or IdeaExchange, a common gripe you see is that the IdeaExchange is often neglected. Winter 24 is coming in like a Nor’easter storm with ideas sourced from the IdeaExchange. Only unlike of a Nor’easter, it won’t ruin your weekend plans.

Much to the delight of admins everywhere, permission sets received a few new capabilities. First, and arguably most important, you can now run a report on permission set groups. I’ve heard about how this is an issue from countless customers, so this is a big win for everyone. Second, you can now see what’s assigned to a permission set group (beta).

To wrap out this hat trick of permission set goodness, you can now see how many permission set groups a permission set is assigned to.

Now that permission sets are out of the way, let’s get back to the rest.

Dynamic forms are now on mobile (generally available)
Dynamic forms are now available on most standard objects now. I’ve been using this more lately and I like it. I admittedly am still old school and default to using page layouts. But in my quixotic quest to never show more than I have to during a demo, I’ve been using dynamic forms to create more elegant record detail tabs. If this paragraph makes no sense, check out this article from Salesforce Ben which should help clear the air.
Event monitoring has a new event type: insufficient access. It’s available in the API, but not the event monitoring analytics app which seems like a bit of a miss.
Mass quick actions on related lists are now GA. I have yet to use this but I think this is really cool.

Data Cloud

In what I can only speculate is reaction to recent litigation, “real time” is now “near real-time.“

Experience Cloud

Component variations (beta) allows you to create variations of of components instead of page variations. It’s not clear to me why you’d use one over another. Thinking this through it might be you create a page variation for something broad, like a page per profile and then you can further target based on things within the profile like city or another attribute.
Actions bar is now GA. I think this looks really cool.

Field Service

Mobile work briefing, which is an AI tool to write up service notes, is coming later this winter.
Field service now lets you limit types of work. For example, if you want to limit new installs to focus on repairs for a product recall, you can now do that by limiting work capacity.
The same job site can now be a service objective to a scheduling policy.
In Gantt view, you can create and filter crew skills. Related, you can now sort candidates and filter by their skills.

Speaking of Gannt chart quality of life updates, you can now add absences in hours instead of just minutes.
Dependencies for service appointments are easier now, and are done via field sets.
Maintenance plan frequency fields are going to move to maintenance work rules effective Winter 25 (aka next year)
Service documents can be built in document builder (beta). I am personally very stoked about this. The more we get things into a solution built on app builder, the better. Sorry I don’t have a screenshot to share, but it’s glorious.
The tab bar in the mobile app can be changed.

There’s a pilot for location based triggers for check ins and out.

Mobile

Images can be attached to records offline. TIL that this did not exist already.
Mobile publisher now allows you the ability to define permissions based on location. Just requires you to enable geofencing.

Sales Cloud

Do you like the taste of Salesforce Maps but want less calories? Say hello to Salesforce Maps Lite. Only available to customers on Hyperforce. Personally, I just wish they’d move maps into a core Sales/Service license as it’s incredibly powerful, which is probably why it’ll remain an add-on. Until then, you can take advantage of this new tab in Sales Cloud.

Managers can take delight in now being able to see the history for opportunity splits
Lead and Contact home have a new look. This must be the new “clean your room report.”

Sales engagement (fka High Velocity Sales) has a new setup, which now includes call, chat, email, and automated actions.
With all of the buzz about AI, I’ve noticed a whole market of tools that listen to meetings and can create a summary. You can now do that in UE and PE Salesforce. Upload a recording and it’ll create a call summary. Managers too can benefit from this.

Commit calculator (requires revenue intelligence SKU) makes your sales forecasting feel less like this

and more like this

I’m all about saving clicks, and love this classic Twitter account. Now in forecasts, you can save clicks by seeing the recent activity within an opportunity. Really like how clean this looks with the Recent Activity column on the far right.