The days are slowly but surely getting longer, the taste of mince pies is but a distant memory, and Salesforce has treated us to the first of their triannual 2023 updates.

Our team have been busy reviewing the Spring ‘23 Release Notes. Here are some things we thought you ought to know about…

Enhanced Domains

You will have likely seen communications recently regarding Enhanced Domains. At Hyphen8, we have been proactively communicating to our customers regarding the next steps where required.

In Spring ‘23, Enhanced Domains will be deployed in production orgs and all remaining sandboxes and non-production orgs. A full timeline of Enhanced Domains can be found below:

What are Enhanced Domains?

You may have already heard of the Salesforce feature My Domain. With My Domain, you choose a subdomain, or a name, to use in ALL URLs that Salesforce serves for your org. This allows you to include your brand in those URLS. For example, you can log into Salesforce with:

mycompany.my.salesforce.com.

Enhanced Domains are the next iteration of the My Domain feature. When you deploy Enhanced Domains, your My Domain name is used in an increased number of URLs, including being used in any Visualforce pages you may have, and in Salesforce hosted URLs for your sites (both Experience Cloud sites and Salesforce sites.)

Although it is possible to disable turning on Enhanced Domains until Winter ’24, we have been advising against this where possible and recommending that this is allowed to go Live in your production environment from Spring ’23.

Enhanced domains provide multiple benefits:

• Branding: URLs across your org contain your company-specific My Domain name, including URLs for your Experience Cloud sites, Salesforce Sites, Visualforce pages, and content files.
• Stability: Your org’s URLs remain stable when your org is moved to another Salesforce instance.
• Compliance: Enhanced domains comply with the latest browser requirements, avoiding third-party cookies.

Multi-Factor Authentication

This is another “Must do” from Salesforce within this Spring ‘23 release. Salesforce users are now obligated to use Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) when accessing Salesforce, through both direct logins or single sign-on logins. Salesforce is automatically enabling MFA for direct logins, to be rolled out in phases starting with the Spring ’23 release. Eventually, MFA will be a permanent requirement for logging in to Salesforce.

If you still do not have MFA enabled in your Org and would like some assistance with this, please do get in touch.

Process Builder to Salesforce Flow Migration Tool

Salesforce have taken one step further toward the retirement of Process Builders and Workflow rules, with the enhancement of their Migrate to Flow tool. In addition to Workflow Rules, Admins may now use the tool to convert Process Builder processes into Flows. With Salesforce continuously improving the functionality of Flows, it’s time to start thinking about making the switch.

This is the perfect opportunity to start reviewing your current processes before migrating and we are here to help. If you’d like to discuss how we can support you in this, please do get in touch.

Dynamic Forms for Cases and Leads

Dynamic Forms are being further enhanced in Spring ’23. The feature gives admins a way to create user led, intuitive page layouts that show only what is needed, doing away with the congestion of unnecessary fields on record pages. In Winter ’23 we saw Dynamic Forms becoming available on some Standard Objects, but not all. Now in Spring ’23, Dynamic Forms is available for use on Cases and Leads. Hurrah!

Reports and Dashboards

There are a lot of developments in this release relating to Reports and Dashboards.

Admins now can create a dynamic report filter that shows personalised results for each user. For example, an opportunity report could be created for a sales team that includes a filter for the Opportunity Owner, personalizing the results for each team member.

Salesforce users may now organise the reports and dashboards that are important to them using Collections, regardless of the report/dashboard’s locations (even if they exist in multiple folders.)

Salesforce users may also now improve their dashboard data targeting, by using additional filters on Salesforce Lightning dashboards. There is no longer the need to maintain different versions of the same dashboard for different business units and/or regions, with the previous limit of three filters. Users may now segment and analyse data more precisely with the ability to use up to five filters.

Bring External Data to Flow Builder without Code

This is a nice addition to Salesforce’s Flow functionality (currently in BETA), highlighting Salesforce’s commitment to continuously improving their existing products/features. I’m picking this one out as one of my favourites from the many improvements detailed within the Flow section of the release notes. From Spring ‘23 you may now use HTTP Callouts to pull external data into their flows. With organisations often holding/relying on data in multiple silos, this new feature could be helpful if an action relied on data held outside of Salesforce. For example, you could potentially pull payment information from a separate system directly into Salesforce.

Capture Inclusive Data with Gender Identity and Pronoun Fields

With this release, organisations may further improve data accuracy, establish trust, and connect with their stakeholders using gender-inclusive fields which align with their self-identified pronouns and gender identity. Optional picklist fields for pronouns and gender identity have been added to Lead, Contact, and Person Account objects. Admins may use pre-approved default value sets or create their own.

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