It’s Beginning to Look a lot Like Winter (Release)

Fall has officially settled in and winter is almost here, which means a new winter release for Salesforce is scheduled to hit the ohana soon. As an early Christmas present, we’d like to give you our favorite features from Winter ‘22’s release notes. Hopefully this brief preview will give those of you in the Salesforce ecosystem an idea of what’s to come for the next release, which is scheduled for November 5, 2021.

1. Salesforce Surveys

Salesforce surveys can now be shared with users of social media channels such as WhatsApp and Facebook—or even simple SMS messaging. You can also add multiple types of merge fields to your conditions or target fields, such as associated records or participant fields. 

2. Dynamic Gauge Charts

Gauge charts are getting an update that will allow the chart to change depending on what is entered in the source report. For the dynamic gauge chart, instead of using numerical values for the different segments, you would use a percentage instead i.e. 1-25%, 25%-50%, 75%-100% and so on.

3. Dynamic Interactions

Lightning Pages are now getting a new feature that will allow dynamic interactions. If a user is viewing a lightning page component and selects an item on a list, what happens is left up to the admin that built that component in the builder. For example, if you had an account named Bitwise Industries, a user could click on the account record and then an automation would fire so you could see the location of Bitwise on a map.

4. Inline Editing on Reports

Don’t you hate it when you run a report and then you see either a date, picklist, or lookup field is incorrect and now you need to go back into report builder to change that? Well not anymore! In-line editing on run reports is getting upgraded so reports that have been run can now be edited to adjust a date, picklist, or lookup field. This is currently in Beta testing.

5. Flows

Winter ‘22 brings plenty of improvements to Salesforce Flow that could easily have its own top ten. Here’s a highlight of some of the most important features:

• Navigation Buttons in Screen Flow Can Now be Relabeled
• Flow Elements Can Now be Reconnected in Auto-Layout
• New Minutes Options for Scheduled Paths in Record-trigger Flows
• Screen Flow: New Roll Back Record Elements
• Record-Trigger Flow Start Element Changes

Here are a few new Flow features that we feel deserve their own section.

6. Flow Orchestrator

Flow Orchestrator has been talked about for a while; we heard about it before the release notes were even published. Essentially, if you have multiple flows running at the same time, you can combine them into a single flow and separate them out in various stages so they still run when you need them to run. 

7. New Flow Action – Outbound Message

Could this be the end for workflow rules? Outbound messages will be available as an action in record-triggered flows. This new addition further solidifies flows as the go-to automation tool for admins.

8. Language and Locale Settings

By no means is this new, but it does go to show the steps Salesforce is taking to stay true to their Ohana culture to include diversity and inclusivity to as many people as possible. Now 430 time zones can be selected, along with more languages and locales. 

9. Org-specific Metrics For Lightning Pages

Have you ever wondered how your record pages are performing? Salesforce provides a button called “Analyze” in the Lightning App Builder for Admins to see load times and give recommendations on how to improve them. For the Winter ‘22 release, this feature is now automatic every time you open up the Lightning App Builder and we now have a few new metrics that we can use such as the end-users browser speed, network latency, and number of cores.

10. Email Template Builder Updates

Email Template Builder has been getting increasingly more powerful, allowing admins and end-users to create fantastic-looking emails to send to their clients. The following release now includes these features:

• Subject Field Can Now Be Up To 1,000 Characters Long
• Add Rows and Columns
• Add Indentations in Rich Text Components
• Add Column Padding

We’re always so excited to see what optimizations come with each Salesforce Release. Adopting and leveraging new Salesforce features not only improves our internal workflows, but allows us to be a better service provider to our clients. We’ll be back a couple of weeks after the official release with a more detailed overview of how these features have helped our team!

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This blog post was written by Himadri Sinha and Tommy Le. 

Himadri Sinha is an Apprentice with our Oakland Salesforce Apprenticeship at Bitwise Industries. He loves to play video games, binge-watch anime and sci-fi films, cook delicious food, and visit his family in San Francisco.

Tommy Le is a Salesforce Administrator at Bitwise Industries. You’ll either find him overusing the word “hella” in almost every single sentence or you’ll find him slaying monsters and demons in Diablo II.