The Salesforce Winter ’23 Release Notes are out, and they include important features for marketers who are on the Salesforce platform.
We get three major releases from Salesforce each year — Spring, Summer and Winter. Each Salesforce release includes upgrades and enhancements that affect Salesforce orgs in different ways.
So, if you’re using and managing marketing operations for your company or organization and want to know more about Salesforce CRM, then you’re in the right place. We’re going to cover everything you need to know about the Salesforce Winter ‘23 Release if you’re a marketer who uses Salesforce.
Marketing-Focused Platform Highlights from the Salesforce Winter ‘23 Release
Marketers who use the Salesforce platform are getting lots of attention from the Salesforce Winter ‘23 Release.
Some updates are changing the way we work to meet evolving technology demands. Others are saving us time by connecting the dots in a logical way.
All we know is, this release includes big updates for people in the marketing world.
Highlight #1: MFA Enhancement for Smaller Orgs
The Winter ‘23 release will enable multi-factor authentication (MFA) for direct logins to Salesforce for orgs with fewer than 100 active users. This update will then become enforced when the Spring ‘23 release comes around early next year.
If your Salesforce org falls under the 100 active user threshold, it’s best to make sure you are fully compliant with the MFA requirement now and make sure any MFA-exempt user types are prevented from being affected by this update.
Any Salesforce org that has more than 100 active users will experience this update in a future release.
Highlight #2: Dynamic Forms for Standard Objects
Dynamic Forms are now finally available for Accounts, Person Accounts, Contacts, and Opportunities! Dynamic Forms are components you can add to your Lightning Record Page to help customize your page layouts even more.
Instead of using the standard page layout component, you can add specific fields and sections to the Lightning Record Page and add visibility rules to show users only what they need at that time.
You can also automate the process of creating dynamic forms by migrating the Record Detail component to a Dynamic Form component with just one button.
Highlight #3: Salesforce Reports and Dashboards Updates
Salesforce continues to ensure that Reports and Dashboards get new updates with each release throughout the year.
Enhancement #1: Filter Custom Report Types by Salesforce Fields (Beta)
Salesforce continues to provide enhancements to help ensure users can pick the best report type for any use case. Users can now filter custom report types by specific fields to ensure that report type contains the fields needed for the report.
This feature is extremely useful for finding the right custom report type and allows users to filter by up to 20 fields that are required for the specific report they are building.
Enhancement #2: Review a Custom Report Type’s Structure During Report Creation
When getting ready to select a custom report type, users are now able to review the structure of that report type before moving forward with creating a new report.
The details panel for the custom report type will now include a section that shows the relationships between the joined objects and provides useful information on the outcomes of the joins that were set up for the report type.
Highlight #4: User Permissions Updates
Improvement #1: Manage Your Permission Assignments with the User Access and Permission Assistant
Previously known as the Permissions Helper, the User Access and Permissions Assistant is an app through the Salesforce AppExchange to help analyze and report on permission assignments.
Following the Salesforce best practice to approach user management by applying the principle of least privilege, this tool can help with monitoring and managing permissions across your org.
Some features available through this tool are:
- Analyzing permissions by user, permission set, or permission set group to understand who has a particular permission.
- Converting a profile to a permission set
- Reporting on users, permission sets, or permission set groups to further understand who has what permissions.
- You can also report on permission dependency and visualize it so you can see everything that’s dependent on a specific permission.
Improvement #2: Set Field-Level Security for a Field on Permission Sets During Field Creation
As Salesforce moves its customers toward using Permission Sets over Profiles, it will continue to push out new updates for Permission Sets to become more powerful.
When creating new fields on an object, you will now have the ability to set field-level security on permission sets instead of profiles to help follow security best practices.
To use this new beta feature, you should enable it through the User Management Settings in your Salesforce Setup.
Highlight #5: Salesforce Flow Updates
You may have heard the phrase “Flow is the future” in Salesforce messaging over the past couple of years. This is because Salesforce is consistently releasing new Flow features to prepare for the retirement of Process Builder and Workflow Rules in the upcoming years.
You should anticipate seeing awesome features for Salesforce Flow being included in every release moving forward for a while.
Here are some of our favorites from this release.
Improvement #1: Cut and Paste Flow Elements
If you’ve ever had to move a Flow element from one section to another you know how frustrating it has been in the past. We were required to copy a component, paste in the new section, update any references to the old version of the component, and then delete the old component.
Salesforce has answered this frustration by providing a new feature where you can cut and paste a Flow element that eliminates all of the extra steps of cleaning up your Flow when you move an element.
Improvement #2: Specify Time Offsets in Months for Scheduled Paths
Before the Winter ‘23 release, Salesforce users were only able to set up scheduled paths by looking at the time since a trigger in minutes, hours, or days.
This new Salesforce feature now includes the ability to schedule your path to run on the same calendar day of another month.
Improvement #3: Use In and Not In Operations to Find Related Records
Flows are getting new operators that can be used in Get Records, Update Records, and Delete Records elements.
These new operators, In and Not In, can help users get related records without using a Loop element and reduce the number of SOQL queries and DML statements within the Flow.
Improvement #4: Select Multiple Records from a Table in a Screen Flow (Beta)
The new Data Table screen flow component is available to display a list of records on a flow screen. When building the screen flow, you can set the table to ready only or provide your users the ability to select multiple records to use later in the flow.
Improvement #5: Use Record-Triggered Flows to Update Related Records
The Winter ‘23 release brings a new feature where you can use record-triggered flows to update any record that is related to the record that originally triggers the Flow.
With this feature, users are also able to set filters to only update specific related records instead of all related records.
Improvement #6: Workflow Rule Creation will no longer be available
The Winter ‘23 Release will now block Salesforce users from creating any new Workflow Rules moving forward. This is the next big step toward retiring Workflow Rules entirely as Salesforce continues to push users to move toward Flows.
This update will not affect your current Workflow Rules as you will still be able to activate, deactivate, and edit your existing automations.
Check out our other blog post on migrating your current Workflow Rules and Process Builder to Flow through the new conversion to learn more about how you can prepare for the Workflow Rule retirement.
Highlight #6: Sales Cloud for Slack (Generally Available)
Since Salesforce purchased Slack in July 2021, they have been working hard to connect these two systems in a way that will improve Sales productivity.
This release brings a new feature where sales teams can access important information and get notifications about their accounts and opportunities directly in Slack. The new Sales Cloud for Slack app provides the ability for your sales team to collaborate in opportunity-focused channels and to automate record update notifications to be pushed into Slack directly from Salesforce.
Highlight #7: Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot) Updates
Please check out my colleague Erin Duncan’s blog post on all things Pardot from the Winter ’23 release.
Salesforce is getting bigger and better all the time
B2B marketers who come to Salesforce are usually looking to scale their efforts and grow in a way that makes sense. These latest enhancements from the Salesforce Winter ‘23 Release get marketers closer to those goals by saving them time and resources. Contact the team at Sercante to get help implementing these enhancements in your Salesforce org. And leave us a comment below to let us know what you think about the Winter ‘23 Release.
