The Spring ’22 Release is coming up on us fast! There are a lot of great previews out there already, but here is my entry into the fray. Here I will apply the usual disclaimer that my bias is towards Platform/Customization, Service Cloud/Salesforce Field Service, and Revenue Cloud.
The usual must-follows are putting out their summaries, which I would always recommend above my own!
UnofficialSF / Alex Edelstein & Adam White: Spring ’22 Sneak Peak. As usual, the ultimate guide to all things Flow.
SalesforceBen / Christine Marshall: 10 Hottest Salesforce Spring ’22 Features
AccidentalCoder / Vibhor Goel: Not out quite yet but always worth a look.
Salesforces News Technology Stuff / Tushar Sharma. Spring ’22 Release Notes Quick Overview.
ForcePanda / Narender Singh: Not posted yet, but keep an eye out as Narender’s inputs are always great.
Without further ado, let’s get into the Top 10 items that piqued my interest (and trying to spread the wealth a bit and not focus only on Flow)...
10. Field Service – Dispatch Console Gantt Updates
Cheating a bit to start off here, as there are a few updates to the SFS Dispatch Gantt that are of interest. First, holidays are now called out separately on the Gantt, which is a welcome change and visual identifier.
Second, there is a new Custom Permission added that will hide Live Positions and Last Seen indicators for Service Resources on the Gantt. This allows for additional security to be applied, especially in situations where live tracking should not be allowed. Previously this was a difficult area to deal with.
Lastly, the Dispatch Console refresh/polling is adjusted to run less frequently when users are inactive, which saves resources from being wasted on pointless refreshes.
9. Flow – Workflow Rule => Flow Conversion Tool
With the upcoming retirement of Workflow Rules and Process Builder, there is a lot of work coming for the Awesome Admins out there. The Einstein Automate team have come to the rescue in the Spring ’22 release by providing a Workflow Rule => Flow conversion tool. This is in Beta currently and it will be interesting to see how all the different combinations possible put it through the testing cycle over the upcoming months. This will potentially be a big time saver, and the upcoming record-triggered Flow management options make conversions like this a viable, and much less painful, proposition.
8. Permissions – Permission Set and Permission Set Group Assignment Management
Assigning and maintaining Permission Sets and Permission Set Groups was previously one of the clumsier areas of user and permission management. Most will be familiar with the endless clicking through multiple pages trying to get to certain users, and often building scripts to do this type of work instead. The admin experience just got a lot easier with an improved Lightning List View assignment that allows for search. Additionally, the expiration date management appears to have gotten easier as it can be managed from this same location. Expiration Date for Permission Sets and Groups was an exciting development previously, but had a number of problems that made it very difficult to work with, and hopefully we’re now working through some of those with Spring ’22.
7. Flow – Generate Choice Set from Collection
The ability to auto generate a choice set from a collection is another important addition for flow builder. Notice below that in the choice set created is just referencing a previously gathered Record Collection and we no longer have to query and build it separately. This will be a nice efficiency gain while building flows.
6. Analytics – Report Type Selection Provides Details
It is often frustrating for users creating reports as the selection of which report type to use requires previous knowledge, or good naming conventions, to know beforehand what joins and fields you’re getting. With the Spring 22 release, the Report Type selection has been vastly improved. Most importantly you can see from a summary tab the objects used in the report and then have the ability to also see which fields are included (see #3 and #4 below).
5. Knowledge – Links to Articles Now Map to Most Recent Version
Knowledge users will frequently share links to knowledge articles. Prior to Spring ’22 release, this was often done by copying the URL, but if the version of the article changed, then the link pointed to the old/outdated version. Now there is a new Copy Article Link button introduced that will always direct the link to the latest version of the Article, so that stale links don’t cause a problem.
4. Briefcase Builder – Related Object Record(s) Priming
Briefcase has been spotlighted on this blog before when it was in pilot phase. It’s had a number of improvements since then, and the Spring ’22 release adds another tool to expand offline capabilities through more selective record priming. Now we have the ability to prime related record(s) through lookup or related list relationships to another primed object. These related records can then be filtered further, just as the primary records can be. This will be another interesting one to test heavily for those businesses needing full offline capabilities on Field Service Mobile.
3. Flow – Record-Triggered Flow Run Order
Prior to this new feature, the typical practice was to try to group all record-triggered flow actions into a single Flow per context. For example, you may have a record-triggered flow for each: AccountBeforeInsert, AccountBeforeUpdate, AccountAfterInsert, AccountAfterUpdate. When enough different actions were required in a given context, this could lead to a bloated and confusing flow.
The new ability to set the order of execution for record-triggered Flows under each context brings into play the option to create smaller bits of functionality per Flow. It will take some time to sort out best practices here, but I have some excitement here initially because we can insert new logic without opening up all existing logic to the possibility of regression.
2. Flow – Collection Filter
Who enjoys gathering a collection of records, then looping through them and applying a decision element to then assign only a portion of those records to a different collection? Not me! Spring ’22 includes a huge improvement that allows you to pass the collection directly into a filter element and avoid all the previous hassle! Now to rebuild a couple hundred flows.
1. Flow – Flow Trigger Explorer
The importance of the release of Flow Trigger Explorer goes hand in hand with the ability to control the run order of Record-triggered Flows mentioned earlier. One of the major deficits of Flow remaining was the ability to visualize and organize them into a coherent overall picture. The problem is solved in a big way as the Flow Trigger Explorer provides a great visualization to show what Flows are firing and when.
