It’s that time of year again…*drum roll*…

It’s time for the highly anticipated Salesforce Summer ’23 release!

This latest release brings some exciting new features. Sit back and join me as I explore some of the highlights from the release notes.

Calendar

Want to manage reviews with your grantees? Schedule project deadlines or when peer reviews are due?” Many of our customers are interested in exploring how they can improve their productivity on the platform.

In a timely fashion, this Salesforce release brings some fantastic enhancements to Salesforce’s calendar:

1. The ability to see up to 500 events in the Calendar view.
2. Events can be enabled for up to 50 shared calendars and resources.
3. Drag and drop events to reschedule.
4. Click on an event on the calendar view to preview the event. Then, click again to go directly to the event record page.
5. Calendar views show overlapping event tiles, expanded text, and shaded colouring for dates in the past.

Enhancements to Reports and Dashboards

Enhancements to Reports and Dashboards

Salesforce aren’t on enhancing their suite of reporting and dashboard features. From Summer ’23, you can now enhance your dashboard visualisations by including images, rich text, and dashboard widgets. You can now guide users through their data with section titles, narrative text…

… and even animated GIFs!

via GIPHY

Programme and portfolio reporting and visualisations are now baked into Salesforce following the acquisition of Tableau (now called CRM Analytics) – and it can give you funding insights without needing a separate tool. It’s available at a discounted rate for nonprofits!

CRM Analytics empowers your Salesforce users with actionable insights and AI-driven analytics. We’ve recently been supporting some of our customers with implementing CRM Analytics into their Salesforce Orgs. If you’d be interested in finding out more about how CRM Analytics could work for your organisation, please do get in touch.

Bring External Data into Flow Builder… Without the need for code!

This is an exciting feature coming to Flow Builder. You can now automate processes with external data held outside of Salesforce, without the need for a developer to provide code.

Many organisations hold their data in multiple places, so this new functionality makes it easier when there is something you want to automate on Salesforce that is reliant on data held elsewhere. For example, you could potentially pull payment information from a separate system directly into Salesforce.

If you’re finding that your data is stored in too many places, and have a need to rationalise, our Service Design team can help you make sure your processes and flows are fully optimised and reflect best practice. Get in touch to find out more.

Enhanced Send Email Flow Action

Trying to make it even easier for Salesforce to be your single source of truth? Or perhaps you’re struggling to make sure users log their emails against Salesforce records?… From Summer ’23 you can now automatically log emails to a record’s Activity Timeline when using the Send Email action in Flow. Previously, you were restricted in how you could send and log emails, but now you have this flexibility without additional development!

You can log an email to a recipient record, including leads, contacts, and person accounts. You can also log an email to a non-recipient record, like an account or opportunity. Or, you can log an email to both.

You can also reuse email content with Lightning and Classic email templates in the Send Email action. If your email template has merge fields, you can use the recipient record or a related record (or both) to populate the merge fields.

Gender-Neutral Salutations

From Summer ’23 you can ensure your Salesforce instance is even more inclusive from the start by making the Mx. salutation available by default. You can customise the Salutation field to include other nonbinary or titles which are specific to your organisation.

As a side note (but related to the above!), we’re seeing many of the funders we work with thinking about how they may better capture DEI data in the future. A significant step in advancing DEI in grant-making was recently taken by the DEI Data Group. With funding from The Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and The National Lottery Community Fund, an independent group of UK funders, known as the DEI Data Group set out to create a framework known as the DEI Data Standard. I recently put together a blog about the DEI Data Standard, and how you can get started. Please do drop me a line if you have any thoughts about this. It would be great to hear from you.

Improved In-App Guidance with Targeted Prompts on Record Fields

Have a field that’s always completed incorrectly? Need to keep telling your users how, what or why they need to fill in? Summer ’23 allows admins to add more specific guidance for users within your Salesforce applications. You can now target any field on a record page, dynamic form, or the Create window in a targeted prompt that you create with In-App Guidance Builder. Useful when you want to guide your users through a specific process within your Salesforce Org!

Bye bye, Process Builder!

From Summer ’23 you’ll have to say so long, farewell, auf wiedersehen and goodbye(!) to creating new Process Builders. Moving forward, Salesforce are putting their efforts into improving the Flow functionality.

If you haven’t started already, it’s time to start thinking about migrating your automations into Flows. Please do get in touch with us, if you would like to explore how we can help you with this.