Highlights From the Salesforce Summer '23 Release - Ad Victoriam Salesforce Simplified Podcast
May 10, 2023

Highlights from the Salesforce Summer ’23 Release

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Episode Notes/Resources:

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 Summer ‘23 Release. 

In addition to her Salesforce Ben duties, Christine is a 8x Salesforce-Certified Evangelist, who also serves as a Salesforce Admin Group leader and has been named – several times – as a Salesforce MVP.

Christine Marshall on LinkedIn: 

https://bit.ly/3UI8jjK

Salesforce Ben:
https://www.salesforceben.com/

Bristol Salesforce Admin User Group: 

http://bit.ly/3NZi62W

Salesforce Summer ‘23 Release Notes:

https://bit.ly/41FT6DG

Transcription:

Announcer:
This is Salesforce Simplified, the podcast from Ad Victoriam Solutions. Here’s your host, Mike Boyle.

Mike Boyle:
I just cannot believe that we’re going to be talking about summer. Weren’t we just talking about spring not too long ago? Hi everyone. Welcome to the Salesforce Simplified podcast. I’m so thrilled that we’re again having the opportunity to today talk with Salesforce Ben’s Courses and Community Director, Christine Marshall, about some of her favorite new things that are tucked inside Salesforce’s Summer ’23 release. Now, if you don’t know, in addition to her Salesforce Ben duties, Christine is a seven times Salesforce certified evangelist and she also serves as a Salesforce admin group leader and has been named numerous times as a Salesforce MVP. Welcome back to the Salesforce Simplified Podcast. Christine, how are you? Ready for summer?

Christine Marshall:
Thank you, Mike. Thank you for having me back. And I’m based in the UK so it’s never too early to talk about summer. I am reporting in today from a very gray and cloudy Bristol.

Mike Boyle:
Well, the sun will come out tomorrow, I think is the way the song goes. So, for those who are listening who may not know, salesforceben.com is a one-stop knowledge center to learn about all things Salesforce. And in addition to all the terrific Salesforce related articles that you’ll find there, and believe me, you’ll get lost. You’ll be gone for days. There’s a helpful get a job section and there is something that’s really near and dear to your heart, Christine, and that’s the get certified section. Why don’t you tell folks about that if they’re not familiar with it?

Christine Marshall:
Absolutely. Well, my passion is helping people, especially at the beginning of their journey with Salesforce, entry level people transitioning into a Salesforce career. So, I really focus a lot on associates, admin, content, advanced admin, and it can be very overwhelming for people that are new to the ecosystem to know where to start, how to get certified, which certifications to get. So, we have this central page called “get certified”, which provides you with all of the information you need to explain certifications and the best ways to get certified, how to swot up for those exams, and lots and lots of tips about how to pass them because they are incredibly daunting.

But in addition to our get certified page, we also have the Salesforce Ben courses website. This is where we provide additional material to help people with their certifications and also with their skill building. So, we offer practice exam packs and also written and video courses for people. We actually have a whole bunch of free courses that a lot of people may not be aware of. In particular, our free associate course is on there and we also have a free migrate to Flow course as well. We are thrilled because we recently crossed over 20,000 students, so we are absolutely loving the fact that we’re able to help so many people on their Salesforce journey.

Mike Boyle:
Yeah, that’s terrific. Congratulations on that. And I get a kick, like on LinkedIn, people will do posts and they proudly display their Salesforce certificate and they thank Salesforce Ben. I think that’s really cool. Congrats on all that. And again, for those who want to check that out, it’s SalesforceBen.com.

So, Christine, before we get into some of the Summer ’23 highlights, I always ask you this one question, did you feel after digesting all of this that there was one main focus or theme to this release as there has been in the past?

Christine Marshall:
Initially, I didn’t feel that there was a central theme. I felt like it bounced around with lots and lots of enhancements in lots of different areas, and I think we’re going to see that when we cover some of the top ones today. But that said, I do think there is a massive push on moving permissions from profiles to permission sets. So, we are seeing a lot of work on that and I think that’s because of the passion of the team. They’re headed up by Cheryl Feldman. She is so super passionate about making user management better for us all and she’s really spearheading this campaign to move things forward, so we’re definitely seeing a lot of ramping up on that.

Mike Boyle:
Okay. So, let’s go through some of these Summer ’23 release features that you would like to highlight. There’s eight of them, and this first one is Dynamic Forms for Mobile in beta. What do you see in there?

Christine Marshall:
So, I have been following and writing about dynamic forms for several years now, and they’ve been gradually improving. First of all it was just custom objects, then we had some standard objects. What’s been missing is that dynamic forms hasn’t been available for mobile, but that is coming. So, it’s now available, it will be available in beta for mobile from Summer ’23 and I think it’s another reason to start looking at using dynamic forms.

Mike Boyle:
Number two on our list is headlined Align Fields Horizontally in Field Sections.

Christine Marshall:
I was thinking about this when planning for the podcast and I thought this is a really hard one to explain with just words and no images, but this is actually my favorite enhancement from the release. It’s so simple, but it makes such a difference to the user experience and the way the page looks and feels. So, what this is doing is it’s the ability to align fields horizontally. And what it means is that if you’ve got two columns on a page layout, it will align the fields correctly. So, the field in the left-hand column and the field in the right-hand column will align as you see them when you edit the page. What happens at the moment is you set them all up and edit and it looks fine and then you save it, and then if you’ve got a bigger field like an address field or a text field, they don’t align properly. But this tweak, this lovely little enhancement, fixes that problem.

Mike Boyle:
I’ll just remind folks, Christine, that tucked inside this episode notes will be a link to the Summer ’23 release notes and you can just look that up. I believe when they open up that particular note that they’ll see the imagery that you’re talking about. It’ll give them an example of what you’ve been talking about. Number three on our list of eight, enhance your visualizations with images, rich text, and dashboard widgets. That’s a mouthful.

Christine Marshall:
It is indeed. Now unfortunately this is available for unlimited edition only, but I’m hoping that if I talk about it enough, we can apply pressure to Salesforce to release it to other editions as well. But what this means is you can add things like rich text components and images onto your dashboards to make them very, very engaging. So, I’m hoping that that will maybe become maybe available to everyone at some point because I honestly think it will impress users, stakeholders, and it’s going to increase user adoption and engagement.

Show More

Mike Boyle:
I think one of the things that I’d like to call out, one of the main focuses I’ve seen, Christine, is how long some of these titles are. We’re at number four on our list of eight things that Christine Marshall from SalesforceBen.com is calling out for the Salesforce Summer ’23 release, that is Set Field-Level Security for a Field on Permission Sets Instead of Profiles. And that will be generally available.

Christine Marshall:
So, I’d like to caveat that these are the Salesforce names for these release updates and this and the next one are to do with the retirement of permissions on profiles. So they have an end of life date, retirement is due in the Spring ’26 release. There’s still plenty of time to properly plan how you’re going to implement these changes. But what we are seeing is that with every release, we’re getting new tools, new help to help us move permissions from profiles onto permission sets. So the first one here is that setting field level security for a field which was traditionally done by profile can now be done on permission sets. It will be generally available. And the update will also provide an enhancement that enables you to see each permission sets object permission for the field’s object without leaving the page.

Mike Boyle:
And the related one that you were speaking about, which is in beta, is number five on the list, Automate and Migrate User Access with User Access Policies.

Christine Marshall:
Yeah, so, user access policies allow you to declaratively define access for group of users in a single operation. For example, you could specify a group of users to grant or revoke access to things like permission set licenses, permission sets, permission set groups, and more. But with the Summer ’23 release, you’ll be able to automate your user’s assignments, which will be a fantastic help to all the admins out there. And once created, these policies can then be automatically applied when new users are created or existing users updated so you won’t have to go in and do it individually.

Mike Boyle:
And as we progress here, number six on the list of eight here is Boost Productivity with Mass Quick Actions on Related Lists, which is in beta, and Better Performance for Related Lists. I’ll bet there’s a lot there.

Christine Marshall:
Yeah, absolutely. So, we love to hear about performance improvements because people often joke about Lightning not being lightning fast, and I do think they’re a bit unfair. I think Lightning’s fabulous. But one of the changes that they’ve made is that the related list view all page now renders using Lightning web components instead of Aura. So, that’s going to boost the performance and the loading, so, that’s fantastic. But there’s another new addition which will really help your users supercharge their related lists. It means that you can streamline the actions available on a related list, and you can also update related records using mass updates to up to 100 records. So, if you are on the account page and you have a contacts related list and you want to update all of those, you’ll be able to apply mass actions to them.

Mike Boyle:
Number seven on our list is about New Email Composer in Open Beta. Now that one sounds really cool.

Christine Marshall:
Yeah, this is amazing. So, Salesforce is retiring the existing email editor and moving to this new feature-rich HTML text editor and it is packed full of exciting features. Just picking from a few, there’s table support, you can insert tables, you can format table borders in the background. There is media support, so you can upload images, embed videos. There’s a lot with productivity, for example, putting code snippets in, doing search and replace, exporting to PDF. And then in terms of your text formatting, it’s going to become much simpler to do things like changing the font, aligning the text, highlighting, doing a lot of that kind of rich text formatting that historically hasn’t been possible.

Mike Boyle:
And here we are at the last one that, obviously there’s way more release notes, but these are the eight that you’ve wanted to highlight for our chat this time for Summer ’23, and that’s Provide More Detailed In-App Guidance with Targeted Prompts on Record Fields. How does that one look?

Christine Marshall:
So, this is a great addition to in-app guidance. So, orgs get three free prompts, or if you have the paid for version, then you have more prompts and walkthroughs that you can use. But what it does is you can give your users guidance. So, if you were implementing a new feature or you want to help users onboard faster, you can use in-app guidance and it will pop up where you want it to at the right time to the right users and that’s great. But if I was onboarding new sales users and I was looking at opportunities, I might reference a specific field in my prompt to say, “Don’t forget to change the close date field. This close date reflects the date that the contract is signed.” So, I can give them a lot of information around it, but now I can target specific fields.

So, before, my message would have just sort of popped up in the corner and it wouldn’t have directed them exactly where to look. And if your org is anything like mine have been historically, there could be tons and tons of fields. It’s difficult for them to find it. But this works a bit like when you use a validation rule and you can choose to have the rule pop up at the top of the page or pop up at the actual field. It just helps them get to whatever it is you are trying to tell them about, prompt them about, really, really easily.

Mike Boyle:
Whatever makes us get our jobs done better, quicker, more efficiently. Sounds like there’s just a lot to dive into here and obviously as I alluded to earlier, there’s many, many, many more highlights and updates that’ll be in the Summer ’23 release. Christine Marshall from SalesforceBen.com, thank you so much for joining us today. It’s always a pleasure to have you on here. And I can’t believe this, Christine, but before we know it we’ll be back here talking about Salesforce Winter ’24, and that’ll be obviously later this summer. But again, thanks for being with us today.

Christine Marshall:
Thank you for having me, Mike.

Mike Boyle:
And to the audience, if this is your first time listening to our podcast, well first of all, a big old thank you and I hope you’ve found this valuable. The podcast is available anywhere you get podcasts, plus, there was some exciting news that we just learned about. The podcast is now available on YouTube Music. That’s right, YouTube music, on the website and the recently released iOS and Android apps. So look for the Salesforce Simplified podcast there. Check it out when you can. I’m Mike Boyle from Ad Victoriam Solutions, thanks again for listening to the Salesforce Simplified podcast. Our next episode is just around the corner.

Announcer:
You’ve been listening to Salesforce Simplified, the podcast from Ad Victoriam Solutions.

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