The more things you have to provide and click through, the less likely you are to finish that form right. So if we can create an experience that is so much easier, it’s all in one screen. It’s going to be a big, big benefit to our end users. And from a business perspective, this is just all the more reason to adopt something like this, because it will help your users to adopt the platform. It will create more efficiency in the workflow. And so, treating some of these things is an investment upfront, but it ultimately saves time.

This podcast is brought to you by Fast Slow Motion, a team of expert consultants that have helped hundreds of growing businesses build scalable systems on the HubSpot and Salesforce platforms. To learn more, visit fastslowmotion.com. Welcome to the Slow Motion Podcast, where we teach you how to build a business you love while enjoying your life. Our guest today is a highly accomplished Senior Solutions Architect with nearly a decade of experience in the Salesforce ecosystem, and he’s had the opportunity to serve clients on over 600 projects. He’s a passionate and dedicated member of the Salesforce Trailblazer community and serves as its forum ambassador. And he’s also part of the incredible team here at Fast Slow Motion, supporting business leaders and implementing and maximizing Salesforce within their organizations. So it’s a pleasure to introduce Zack Terry. Welcome to the podcast, Zack. Awesome. Great to be here, Sam. Thanks for having me. Looking forward to chatting today.

Good to see you, Zack. And welcome to the podcast. And you know, in today’s episode, Zack will be breaking down the new features and updates from Salesforce’s Summer ’24 release. And he’s going to be talking about key enhancements, including improvements in flows, user access management, and lightning. And Zack will also share practical insights into how these changes can help businesses improve efficiency, enhance customer experiences and drive growth. So whether you’re a leader with a business that’s adopted Salesforce or you’re a professional working hands on with the platform, this episode is packed with valuable information to help you make the most of the latest Salesforce release. So let’s get started. Zack, give us an overview of what the Salesforce Summer 24′ release is all about, and you know what makes it significant?

Yeah, well, let’s start with what is a Salesforce release, right? Salesforce does this three times a year. There’s three releases. There’s a spring, summer, and a winter. So we’ve already had the spring release coming out and now we’re going towards this summer release. Salesforce is constantly working their engineering teams to create features, fix bugs, so it’s everything from minor, minor bug fixes to really, really major new features. So every time release notes come out, it can be like reading a novel. There’s a lot of stuff that’s getting added in each new release. So really what we’re going to try to do today is just distill it into 3 or 4 really primary areas. And today we’re going to be talking about updates to flow.

Salesforce has been investing tremendously in flow. It is of course the de facto automation tool on the platform now, which we’ll talk about later in this podcast. That’s going to be the future. We’re deprecating some things like process builder and workflow rules. And so flow is going to be the way to go. So we’ll talk about some new updates coming to flow. We continue to invest in the lightning experience. And so there’s some really great updates coming to things like dynamic forms and features that are available on mobile app. And we’ll talk about user management as well. There’s some massive updates coming to how admins are going to be able to view and manage user permissions. I’ll probably dive into the weeds a little bit on some of the technical side of things here, but also really focus on, hey, what does this mean as a non-technical user or as a business owner?

Okay, great. So, Zack, you know, before we dive into the updates in this release, Salesforce obviously has recently announced that rules in Process Builder are no longer going to be supported after December 25th. So firstly, can you explain what this means and do you have any advice for business leaders in this regard?

Yeah, absolutely. So we’ve known about this since 21′. So it’s not a new topic but the deadline is approaching right. So it’s timely in the sense that the time to make these changes is running out quickly. So the deadline before Salesforce officially ends support for workflow rules and Process Builder, is going to be the end of 2025. So December of 2025. So that gives us about 18 months to convert our automations that are built on workflow rules and process builders over to flow. So the goal behind that really from Salesforce’s side is to consolidate automation tools and really focus on a more modern experience. Flow is more powerful than both of those other tools. The downside is it requires a lot of effort. If you have been significantly invested in workflow as a process builder. So you’re on an org that’s been around for a decade, more than a decade, it’s likely going to affect you more than if you’re a new user. And if you are a brand new user on Salesforce, you can’t even build a workflow or a process builder. It’s disabled. So you can really only modify existing ones now, right?

So the main thing here is it’s not like your process builders and workflows are just going to stop working, right. You get to December and you don’t do anything. It should most likely continue to work. However, Salesforce ending support for this means there will no longer be any bug fixes. No enhancements are going to be made to these tools. Obviously, as each new release comes out, Salesforce is incrementing API versions, right? So this release I believe is going to be version 61. Next release would be 62. But if you start talking about two, three, five years down the road, eventually the API versions that we’ve got on process builders and workflows, it’s going to catch up to what Salesforce is going to deprecate, because they also deprecate API versions over time where you have to make sure your automation and your apex everything has got the most up to date API version, right. So the risk is if you don’t take the time to transition those automations to flow that at some point they may break.

Now, like I said, I don’t expect that to happen in the immediate term. But it’s going to be in every business’s best interest to take the time to not only transition over to flow, but use this as an opportunity to evaluate the entire automation landscape of your org. If you have workflow tools, if you have process builders, take the time today to start mapping this out. Work with someone like us to help you determine if you need to copy them over 1 to 1, or if you need to go in and evaluate your existing landscape. Consolidate those. We can really help evaluate that landscape. The most important thing is don’t delay, right? Do this as soon as possible. Do it while it is not pressing you because you have the luxury of time, right? We got 18 months to kind of get it set up. Now, if you’re a business with hundreds of process builders, you should have started yesterday, but it’s not too late. There’s plenty of time to do it. Important thing is get started today and get help if you need to.

I think that’s great advice. Okay Zack, so let’s talk about the summer release from Salesforce. So why don’t we start with flows. Seeing as we’re on the subject, what are some of the standout features yet to be released?

Yeah. So this is my personal favorite subject pretty much in all of Salesforce. I love working with flow. Salesforce calls us Flownatics. So I would consider myself a Flownatic. Salesforce, especially in the past two years, I would say has put a ton of investment into flow. So if you’ve been paying attention to how flow has been built out over the last couple of years, that trend is continuing. There’s some really powerful features that are coming out. So one of the more exciting features is the repeater component, which is a new component that was introduced in one of the last two releases. It’s been in beta, but it’s now going GA, so it’s going to be generally available. But not just that, there are additional enhancements coming to it as well. It’s going to support more fields such as lookup fields within that component. So previously it only supported very simple data types like text field, date field, number field. And so the usefulness of it was mostly around creating. But now that we’ve got the ability to put things like lookup components within that repeater, it’s super useful for updating as well.

So, for those of you that are not familiar with the repeater component — essentially what it allows you to do is on a screen flow, you can specify a set of fields that represent either a record to create or a record to update, and the user can input any of those fields and then click add. It creates another block where they can provide additional input. And they can do that as many times as they want. And Salesforce is going to take the output of that and store it in a collection where you can then process it later in flow. And so the implication there is when you’re designing your screen flows, you don’t have to account for all the logic upfront. You don’t have to say, all right, well select this dropdown if you want to create three, and then it will give you the option to put three inputs in, or select five. You just kind of have to preprogram that. Now you don’t have to do that. So very excited about that one.

That’s a huge update coming to screen flows. In the same arena, another screen flow update is a new beta feature called Action Buttons. And this, I think, is one of the best updates that’s come to flow in a long time. So to kind of explain how this works, imagine you’re on a screen. And again a screen is where you are inputting information as a user. So no logic is happening on that screen. You have to hit submit or next. And in between one screen and another screen you can design the logic to do something right. Well, now with action buttons, you can actually place a button on your screen, and when a user clicks that button, it can run a subflow with standard logic and then return the results to the same screen. So from a user experience standpoint, it’s clean, right? It’s incredibly clean and easy. And it doesn’t require you copying from screen to screen to get these updates.

From an administration standpoint, or you know, a developer standpoint doing low-code development in flow — essentially what you have to do is create some flows for your buttons. And if you’re unfamiliar with what a subflow is, it’s essentially what Salesforce would call an auto launched flow. So that means the process itself is invoked somewhere else. And so that means instead of having something that’s triggered by a change on a record, you have some other process, whether that’s Apex, another flow, or something else that is already performing a transaction. And they can call out to that subflow. And so this action button allows you to connect the subflow to the button.

So an example that I built out in my dev work was — let’s imagine that I’m trying to select an account. And then based on that account I want to populate information on the screen that’s dynamic to the account that I selected. So I have a lookup and select an account. And then I select Account Details. It then populates the information that I choose to put on the screen. And another update there is I can make that read only or disabled now in screen flow. So I can display that information in a way where it looks like a field, but the field is disabled so I can’t change it, but I can see it. And then let’s say once I have the account information, I want to go and get all the contacts for that account and display them on a table. So I can click a button, go and get the contacts, display all the contacts related to that account in a data table. And then I can pick one of those contacts — or multiple if you want it, depending on what you want to do. But this scenario is I want to see the opportunities related to a specific contact on an account. So there you have another button, and that button goes and does a similar thing, runs a query in a subflow. It’s going to go and find all the opportunities specific to that contact related through opportunity contact role. And then it will display those opportunities and allow me as a user to select them and then take some action. Maybe you want to close those opportunities or you want to update the closed date of those opportunities in mass. Whatever it is, you got a ton of flexibility to do that.

And almost all of that is a single screen. Before that, that would have required 3 or 4 screens because I’d have to select something, click next, process the logic, display it, select something else, process the logic, display it. Now you can kind of do it all on one screen. So the implication is huge for your users because it just makes things so much easier to use. Similar to if you were going to go and fill out a contact form on a website. The more things you have to provide and click through, the less likely you are to finish that form right. So if we can create an experience that is so much easier, it’s all on one screen, it’s going to be a big, big benefit to our end users. And from a business perspective, this is just all the more reason to adopt something like this, because it will help your users adopt the platform. It will create more efficiency in the daily workflow. And so, creating some of these things is an investment upfront, but it ultimately saves time.

Got it. So anything else from flows this summer?

Another screen flow update — the address component in screen flow. If you worked with this in the past and you’ve had country and state picklists enabled in your org, you’ve probably been frustrated by this because the address component was relatively incompatible with country and state picklists. No more. So it now supports country and state picklists. So when you go and select a state, or you select a country in that component, they are now aligned to code values of the states and the country. So just a lot easier to use, you know, without having to use some workarounds to match that up. And then yeah, huge update, saves a lot of time.

And then the other piece of the address component is when you’re on an account or you’re on a standard object in Salesforce, you go to, let’s say, the mailing address of the contact or shipping address on an account. There’s always been a little lookup search where you could type in an address, and then Google will return matching results. You click it and then it auto populates that in that field. That is now supported in the address component. So now you get the ability to create custom experiences in your screen flows and still allow users the same efficiency that they would have if they were doing this on a standard object. And so that’s a really nice update. Just makes it a lot easier to fill out the address details without having to manually type it all in.

So there are some really good updates. A couple other smaller things. There’s a whole new automation app. And so there’s now something called Automation Home. It is a lightning app. So you click into the app launcher at the top left, if you have access to it. If you’re an admin you’ll see Automation Home now. And this is just a front-facing way to go and see your flows. So it’s nothing revolutionary, but it’s nice to have another area to see where your flows are. It kind of opens things up a little bit. You can see more details as opposed to the list view that you had in setup. There’s a couple new fields that are coming to flow as well, where you can categorize flows in different ways. So you now have some extra customization there.

Then the big one is the ability to debug scheduled triggered flows. Previously you weren’t really able to debug these flows in the same way you were other flows like record-triggered flows. The workaround was — okay, if I need to see if there is a matching record for this scheduled flow, I need to go and find an ID for a specific record that I want to test, put that into the entry criteria and it’ll run. See what happens. Not ideal. Not a very good experience at all. So now you have the ability to debug scheduled triggered flows just like any other flow. You select a record, it runs everything, and it shows up in that debug window. You can see how it works. So small change but big quality of life improvement.

And then kind of three other things I’ll just touch on really quickly. When you add a create element to the flow canvas, you have the ability to check for duplicates directly inside of that element. And so you don’t have to necessarily do other logic outside of that. Key thing to note though, is it’s not the same as your duplicate matching rules in Salesforce. This is completely separate. And so this would be sort of manually checking for that inside of the flow and then determining what to do with any matches. So it does not integrate with your matching rules — it’s a separate mechanism.

There’s also the ability to lock and unlock records with flow now, which is really cool. There’s a lot of use cases in the past where you wanted to lock a record — do you ever want to accept only admins, for example, where you lock that record for everyone except members of a certain group? You can now do this with flow. And so, you can have a record triggered flow — for example, someone changes that opportunity stage. Let’s say you can then lock that record for everyone that’s not on the sales ops team. Right, so the sales ops team could still go in, make some adjustments to that opportunity, but it locks for everyone else. Same idea with unlock. So you meet some criteria on a record. Maybe someone who has the ability to modify that record because they’re in that group that’s allowed to do so makes a change and then that triggers unlocking of the record for everyone else. So that’s a really cool update. I’m sure we’ll see some cool use cases come up for that.

And then finally, this is very small and very nerdy I would say, but you now have the ability to use is blank and is empty operators in your flow. Why do we care about that? So previously the way to do this was to use the is null operator. Well, when you’re working with flow — and same thing with Apex — not everything is null, but it might be empty. And so imagine you have a collection of records and you’re working with an array. Well that array can be empty. You’re going to have brackets with nothing in them, right. So technically it’s not null, it’s just an empty collection. So previously you could run into some issues where if you used is null to check that against an array that was empty, it would not return true. Because technically it’s not null. So now you have the ability to really fine tune this by saying, well, I have a collection or I have an array, I want to check if it’s empty. So then you can say if there’s no values in that array, then let’s do something different than if there were values. So it’s a very small change, but if you’ve run into issues with that, it’s going to be really nice to have the ability to specify.

Awesome. Okay. What about user access management? There’s been a lot of big improvements here as well, right?

Yes. Absolutely. So the architect team at Fast Slow Motion had the opportunity to go to TrailblazerDX. That was in San Francisco this year. We got to sit in on a session with Cheryl Feldman and Bitterman Sklar. And they really own this sort of user management side of things at Salesforce and they talked about what is now coming into this release. And that is making user access management significantly easier.

Let’s talk about what it was before, right. You got profiles. You got permission sets. You got permission set groups. You got muting permission sets. You got sharing rules and organization wide defaults that determine how records are shared. And you’ve got your individual permission set and profile that determine your object level access. And then you got groups you can be a part of. And as you can see there’s a lot going on. Yeah. So it gets very confusing very quickly. So what you always had to do if you have a user sharing issue or an access issue, you kind of have to dive into all of those things. It was always a bit of a needle in a haystack kind of situation.

Well, now the tools coming in Summer ’24 are what every admin wished we had years ago. You’re going to have something called a user summary. You’re going to have permission set summaries, permission set group summaries, public group summaries. So what that means is for each of those items, if you go to a user where you’ve got your reset password and edit buttons and all that kind of stuff, in the back end there’s now a new button called User Summary. The User Summary button is going to open up a summary of all the permissions that user has access to. And that could be profile object level access, permissions sets that they are assigned to and what is in those permission sets, groups that they’re assigned to and which permission sets are in those groups, what public groups they’re part of. And so now instead of having to navigate to each of these areas separately in the system, it’s all on one screen, which is just a massive — yeah, a huge game changer. Huge efficiency update. And this is another example of Salesforce hearing feedback and directly implementing it, and in this case, in a very short time frame.

The goal here is going to be to make setup feel modern. So a lot of stuff in setup is still in classic. So this is really sort of the initial push towards getting lightning in setup. And so over time I would expect a lot more updates to setup outside of just user management, to where it’s going to be more modern, it’s going to look more like the front end of Salesforce. You’re going to have more lightning components, things like that. So that’s something I’m excited about. That’s sort of the direct result of these initial user access updates that are coming along.

There’s also user access policies. This is something that’s been in beta for a little while. It’s now going to be generally available in the Summer ’24 release. But a user access policy is essentially a way to automate the assignment of certain permissions based on some criteria on the user. And so let’s say you create a new user that belongs to a certain role in the organization. And everyone in that role in the organization should also belong to a couple of public groups, and they need some permission sets assigned to them and stuff like that. The user access policy can say, well, whenever I create a new user and the role is X, then automatically go and assign these permission sets and put them into these groups. Right. So yeah, it’s a lot of admin efficiency gains. Just this one piece — managing users — has always been a pretty big time constraint for admins. Especially, you know, think about Salesforce orgs at the enterprise level that have thousands of users. You could have a team of people dedicated just to user management. Right. So this will make this a lot easier for every organization, from those that have 2 or 3 users all the way up to organizations that have thousands.

Zack, let’s move on to Lightning Experience. What are some of the key announcements in lightning for this release that you see?

So I think the most immediately noticeable one is going to be support for dynamic forms and dynamic actions on mobile. Essentially what this means — dynamic forms is Salesforce’s more modern way to design record pages. Previously, with classic and even in lightning, the way you control which fields appear on a page was through a page layout. You get assignment, page layout, certain profiles and things like that. But with dynamic forms you can control all of that in lightning. You can have dynamic visibility of certain fields based on other fields having certain values, but that wasn’t available on mobile. So that now comes to mobile. So you can now design experiences on lightning that are specific to desktop and mobile, with essentially the full power of lightning behind it. Now, obviously there are still some limitations in mobile that you don’t have in desktop, but this kind of bridges the gap even further to where if you want to have those dynamically, conditionally displayed fields on a record page, you can now do that in mobile. And also with actions as well, so you get a more seamless experience. It’s a little bit more consistent as a user. So if I have this experience on desktop, you can now have a similar experience on mobile where you can design completely different experiences if that’s what you want. Love it.

Zack, what else is new in the Salesforce ecosystem?

More lightning updates actually. So two seemingly small updates, but I’m excited about them and I think a lot of people will be too. Dynamic forms now supports blank spaces. If you’ve been working with page layouts for a long time, you know that you can drag a blank space anywhere on the page to help you organize those fields in a way that makes sense. And that was not available on dynamic forms. But now it is. And so the feature gap between page layouts and dynamic forms continues to shrink.

The other piece of this is you can now dynamically control the visibility of a tab on a tabs component on your record page. So when you’re on a record page, you see the details tab with all the fields, and you have related with all the related lists. And you can have other custom tabs and things like that. Right now, you can individually control the visibility of each of those tabs and what’s contained within that tab at the tab level. Previously, the workaround to do that would be to create multiple tab components and have one component have a tab, the other would not have the tab, and then dynamically control the entire component. Now you can just do that with the tab itself. So another big efficiency gain that makes things a lot easier. And that can cut the time it takes to have a similar experience in half or more. Just makes it a lot easier. So those are kind of some of the highlights of what’s coming to lightning in Summer ’24.

Hey Zack, what else should we know about the release and what’s going on in the Salesforce ecosystem?

Go read the release notes if you haven’t. Check out sources like Salesforce Ben, or Jen Lee has Automate This, where she’ll walk through a lot of the features as well. So tons of resources out there if you don’t just want to pour through the release notes, but make sure you take a look, because there are some things we didn’t cover, like industry clouds. So, you know, if you’re on Health Cloud, there are much updates coming to Health Cloud, like you don’t have to download the managed package anymore — it just kind of comes with the license. So that’s a big update. Field Service got some great updates like using content libraries on mobile now. So that’s exciting.

And there’s obviously a lot of AI and data cloud updates that we didn’t talk about. So one of the most exciting of which is Einstein for flow. So imagine just typing a prompt into copilot and saying I need a flow that should automatically deactivate this account when a contact does this, whatever it may be, right. And then Einstein will go and actually generate that flow for you. That’s a super exciting update. There’s a lot of other examples about things going on with AI and other clouds in Salesforce. So if you work in Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, any of the industry clouds — financial services, health cloud, whatever that may be — make sure to go and check out that section of the release notes, because you may find something that really makes your life a lot easier.

Well, Zack, thanks so much for joining us today. For our listeners, that’s it for today’s episode. We hope that you enjoyed hearing Zack break down the newest release from Salesforce. And if you’re interested in connecting with Zack in the Trailblazer community, you can find his profile in the show notes for this episode. Remember to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast platform, or you can find archived episodes at fastslowmotion.com/podcast.