Salesforce Release Winter 2023 - The most important innovations!

It's finally that time again: another Salesforce release is just around the corner. What does it mean? There are a bunch of new features and functions to play around with - almost like Christmas!   

The release date for the release depends on your Salesforce instance, but the major releases are on:   

• September 9, 2022  

• October 7, 2022  

• October 14, 202

In this year's updates, you will find not only many new features, but also improvements in terms of:  

• Lightning Experience,   

• Salesforce Flow,   

• Lightning Web Component,   

• Apex, Experience Cloud,   

• Einstein Automate,   

• Customer Data Platform,   

• Field Service,   

• Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (aka Pardot),   

• Quip, CRM Analytics,   

• Enablement Sites (myTrailhead) and APIs.  

  Here are a few new features at a glance:

Are you ready for the future of Salesforce page layout? What's been on the roadmap for a while: dynamic forms for standard objects? But as of Winter '23, they'll be available for Accounts, Contacts, Person Accounts, and Opportunities - yay!   

And because that's not enough, there's a bonus: The default behavior for migrating to Dynamic Forms has changed. The option "Migrate fields and sections to an accordion component to improve page performance" is no longer enabled by default.  

And while we're on the subject of dynamics: There is a small but important update to the dynamic related list filters. You can now filter a dynamically related list by multiple filter values - previously you could only filter by one value.  

As a reminder, Salesforce Dynamic Related Lists are a combination of features that let you create intelligent, responsive pages that show the right information to the right users at the right time. 

Salesforce proves that Permission Sets are the way of the future and the best practice option. They now allow you to assign field access based on Permission Sets instead of profiles. This feature must be enabled under User Management Settings > Field Level Security for Permission Sets during field creation (Beta).   

Permission Helper has been renamed to User Access and Permission Assistant. This app was created by Salesforce and is available on the AppExchange. It is designed to help you analyze and report on permission sets and to provide a simple wizard for managing permissions.   

Highlights:   

• Analyze the authorization of a user and the origins of the authorization  

• Report on permissions by user, by permission set, or by dependency and extraction  

• An improved permission group management interface that allows you to view combined permissions, manage muting, and maintain assignments with a simple wizard  

You can assign an expiration date to a permission set or permission group. If a permission set or permission group exceeds the expiration date, a user can lose access to the features granted in the permission set or permission group. Does any of this sound familiar? That's because the update was available back in the summer of '22, but won't go into effect until the winter of '23. 

As in previous versions, much attention has been paid to the forecast, and this theme continues in Winter '23. There are numerous improvements, so be sure to check out the full release notes if you use this feature. However, we would like to point out two updates in particular:   

Select custom opportunity fields to include or exclude from your forecasts 

You can now filter your forecasts by custom opportunity number, currency, or pick list fields to get a more accurate forecast! Previously, you could only filter your forecasts by record type, default number, default currency, and default select list fields.  

Work Smoothly with Improved Usability of Salesforce Desktop Site Forecasts 

One innovation that we particularly like! In winter '23, Salesforce significantly improved the visualization of forecasts. Pretty handy: quota fulfillment can now be displayed as a progress bar in %. Users can select the "Show changes in the last 7 days" option and now see the relevant information in a single pop-up when they hover over it.  

You can now easily clone your favorite apps to create new apps in Lightning App Builder - a great time saver for admins! 

A custom address field that works the same as the standard address field has been a much-needed feature for years! This new feature was released as a beta in summer '22 and is generally available in winter '23. Veteran admins know and love the feature from Classic - now also in LEX!  

The new features in Flow make work easier while delivering seamless experiences that engage customers.    

• Create intelligent workflows with Flow Builder, Omni Studio, and Flow Orchestration.  

• Integrate any system with Flow Integration.   

• Find flow elements faster with the search function     

Flow is the automation feature of the future, and this version is full of interesting new features. One update: Starting with the Winter '23 version, you won't see the option to create a new workflow! 

Among the many updates for reports and dashboards, we highlight two of them in particular - because these are especially important for users as well as administrators!  

Filter custom report types by Salesforce fields (Beta) 

In a previous release, we were given the ability to filter report types by Salesforce objects. The Winter '23 release takes this a step further and now allows us to find custom report types that contain a specific standard or custom field. This functionality is currently in beta.  

Verification of the structure of a custom report type during report generation 

This extension allows you to see the structure of custom report types and show the relationships between linked objects. Also, the quick info (the blue box) explains the link type, e.g. whether record A is linked to record B or not.  

The main things we noticed about the Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot) updates were the following:

• Now, the actions for prospects can be performed outside of Account Engagement. What does this mean specifically? You can sign up prospects for a webinar or event, send an SMS or survey, and even use other third-party platforms from within Engagement Studio. Such external actions provide the ability to apply many other Salesforce cases. You can connect the Engagement Studio to various objects or automations on the Salesforce side - a real convenience!     

In summary: 

• External actions are connected to a marketing app extension. They connect Pardot to external platforms using the Pardot API.  

• External actions can be used independently, i.e. you only want the action to be applied to a prospect. Nevertheless, the functionality of a third-party platform is used.  

• External actions can also be used with external activities. That is, in this combination, the action is applied to a prospect and an activity is logged in the prospect's record (engagement history).  

• You know it - prospect records that generate incessant activity. Of course, prospect activity equals increase in score = unintended automated actions. Still, that bot-like activity is hard to control once it starts. Now you can disrupt activity tracking for prospects with an excessive amount of activity.   

• Make sure that Account Engagement tracking code is not placed on web pages that receive a lot of traffic, i.e. pages that could lead to potential customers making thousands of page views.  

• But don't worry: paused prospects who have signed up can continue to receive marketing emails.  

• An icon appears in the prospect list view and an error is displayed in the prospect record.