As we welcome in 2023, Salesforce has a new year’s gift for us in the form of another great update with the Spring ‘23 release. Depending on your instance, you will be upgraded on:
- January 13th
- February 2nd
- February 10th
If you want to find out exactly which weekend your Salesforce instance will be upgraded, head over to Salesforce Trust and click on ‘Maintenance’. You’ll need to know which instance your org is running on so to find out, go to your Setup menu and click on Company Information.
If you’d like a full runthrough of the release, check out this Salesforce Help article for the breakdown. Here are our 8 favourite new features from the Spring ’23 release.
Dynamic Salesforce
Salesforce is getting closer and closer to doing away with the remnants of Classic – like the Page Layout Editor. Dynamic Layouts now take over Cases and Leads, after having been brought to Accounts, Contacts and Opportunities in a previous release. Dynamic Actions are also available in Spring ‘23 for all Standard Objects. The Dynamic Related List feature fell a little short in previous releases, but now has the sought after ‘View All’ link.
Take Action Quicker with the Dynamic Activity Composer
Users can now create activities quicker with buttons rather than the tabbed activity composer, with more actions in the dropdown menus. For example, in the Email dropdown, if a user has more than one email address, they can choose which one to email. Users can also get to their email preferences quickly or easily add an email to their to-do list.
Track Changes to Events and Tasks
Field history tracking for Tasks/Events is a highly demanded feature by customers (33,000 votes!) and it’s finally here. Track up to six fields so your users can see what has changed in an event or task in the Related tab. To enable this, select the Event or Task object in Object Manager, select Fields & Relationships, and click Set History Tracking. You can add the Activity Record History component to your Event and Task Lightning record pages.
Create Personalised Report Filters
Similar to Dynamic Dashboards, where the dashboard is set to view as the logged-in user, Spring ‘23 extends that functionality to Reports. You can now create a dynamic report filter based on the viewing user so that they view records pertinent to them. For example, instead of creating multiple reports that are filtered by specific Opportunity Owners, you can use a relative value to filter by Opportunity Owner equals $USER (the current user viewing the report).
DevOps Center
DevOps Center was Generally Available on December 9, 2022, so whilst not technically part of Spring ‘23, it’s an important milestone. It might sound technical, but if you’ve ever done these things, you will love DevOps:
- Tracked sandbox configuration changes in a spreadsheet
- Deployed changes via Change Sets
- Made changes in sandbox and painfully retraced your steps to make the changes into your live org
Check out Why DevOps Center Is Awesome for Salesforce Admins.
Enhanced Permissions
Already using Permission Sets and tired of only adding new fields to Profiles? You now have the ability to choose the permission sets displayed when setting field-level security. Salesforce will announce end of life for permissions on profiles soon, so this is a great way to apply user management best practice.
Inclusive Data
Engage with customers the way they identify with pronoun and gender identity fields, via new optional picklist fields on the Contact, Person Account, and Lead objects. Go into Object Manager in Setup to manage the field-level security, add or edit picklist values, or add the fields to page layouts.
Deploy Enhanced Domains
To comply with the latest browser and security standards, Salesforce will enforce enhanced domains on My Domain in all orgs in Winter ’23. What are enhanced domains? It allows your company-specific My Domain name in your URLs, including your Salesforce sites and Experience Cloud sites. Your users can access Salesforce using browsers that block third-party cookies. Since this update does affect your application URLs, including Experience Cloud sites, Salesforce sites, and Visualforce pages, we highly recommend you enable and test enhanced domains in a sandbox before the update is enforced in your live org.
Salesforce deploys enhanced domains in Spring ’23. You can postpone that automatic deployment via a My Domain option. In Summer ’23, Salesforce deploys enhanced domains in orgs without the feature deployed. You can disable this feature until Salesforce enforces this update in Winter ’24. Orgs created in Summer ’22 or later get enhanced domains by default.
Summary
Some of the features mentioned in this blog require some setup steps, if you’re not sure on how to go about that, reach out to us. If you’d like help with some of the more advanced new features, especially enhanced domains or DevOps, we can also help. Enjoy exploring all the great, new features in the Salesforce Spring ’23 release.
