The Winter ’21 release schedule is now complete so - as of October 17th - Winter ’21 is now live across all instances of Salesforce! Following a summer of uncertainty – including a potentially canceled Dreamforce – we’re excited to see all this new functionality get rolled out to Salesforce orgs. The release notes are available here, but we wanted to take a closer look at some of the most impactful changes rolled out in this release with the help of our partners at Extentia.
Here they are:
UI/UX Enhancements
It’s all about the Experience. An overall theme of Winter ’21 is that many of the updates are focused on improving and enhancing the user experience. These are some of the most significant:
Lightning Page Performance Analyzer
The Lightning Page Performance analyzer evaluates fields, related lists, and metadata from record pages to provide concrete recommendations to improve the page speed and UX.
“The use of AI is growing exponentially in digital marketing, increasing 185% in the last two years. * Salesforce Interaction Studio is leveraging AI enabling marketers to create more refined, personalized experiences within their target markets." - Doug Campbell, Salesforce Consultant - fivestar*
Dynamic Forms & Actions
Dynamic forms allow you to display fields and sections of the page as individual components so that you can choose which fields display on a per user basis. The more fields you have – the more compromised is the user experience. Dynamic forms allow you to declutter layouts and deliver a more efficient and effective user experience, and to manage what actions are visible based on a number of different criteria. This allows individual pages and forms to be even more tailored to specific use cases and can further clean up layouts, improve productivity – all towards a significantly improved user experience.
Interaction Studio:
Salesforce purchased Evergage earlier this year signaling a continued commitment to intelligent marketing personalization and finalizing their shift away from the “one to many” or “one to few” approaches that had previously dominated marketing thought. Evergage specializes in marketing personalization and the technology that they created has been brought to Salesforce as Interaction Studio. Available in the Winter ’21 Release, Interaction studio uses Einstein AI to build touchpoints, track interests, and deliver a personalized customer experience at every point in the Sales journey.
"We're looking forward to leveraging all the new features of the Winter '21 Release and we're confident they'll bring tremendous benefit to the implementations we carry out for our customers from the perspective of enhanced security as well as functionality." - Binu Moothedan, VP of Salesforce, Extentia
Multi-factor authentication
Multi-factor authentication is a proven method of dramatically improving account security. Recent Google data showed that MFA blocked 100% of automated bot hacks, and offers clear improvement across a range of security metrics.
Important note: Prior to Winter ’21, Multi-factor authentication was referred to two-factor authentication – terminology changes have been made across the entirety of Salesforce to reflect this change.
In Winter ’21 – Salesforce is introducing the Multi-factor Authentication Assistant – your hub for recommendations, tools, and resources to easily introduce MFA to your users. The MFA assistant represents a larger commitment from Salesforce to improving the user experience to make adopting better security practices easier.
Einstein Guided Bot Templates
The ability to schedule optimizer reporting is a feature that has been highly desired for quite some time. We’re passionate about efficient, effective Salesforce orgs and making sure that you’re running monthly optimizer reports is immensely valuable to maintaining that efficiency and efficacy. Optimizer scheduling allows orgs to do exactly that – getting an optimizer report ran and delivered on any interval you’d like, so that you can easily identify and make high-value changes to your Salesforce Org.
Optimizer improvements
The ability to schedule optimizer reporting is a feature that has been highly desired for quite some time. We’re passionate about efficient, effective Salesforce orgs and making sure that you’re running monthly optimizer reports is immensely valuable to maintaining that efficiency and efficacy. Optimizer scheduling allows orgs to do exactly that – getting an optimizer report ran and delivered on any interval you’d like, so that you can easily identify and make high-value changes to your Salesforce Org.
Flow Enhancements
Flow got some key quality-of-life improvements in the form of the Auto layout mode beta, as well as a new feature that will save admins and developers hours of frustration: the ability to debug flow as specific users.
Auto Layout Mode
Auto layout mode allows you to simply drag and drop elements into flow and allow the lines to connect themselves, making an efficient process more efficient.
Per-user Debugging
Per-user debugging is exactly what it sounds like – admins and developers can now debug flows as if they were specific users, allowing them to see exactly what problems the user is experiencing and get to the root of the issue that much faster.
Wrapping things up
While Salesforce has made many features a whole lot more intuitive and user friendly in Winter ’21, getting the most out of the platform is still a challenge. In fact, 45% of Salesforce customers feel they aren’t leveraging its full capabilities. We’re here to help. We’ve developed healthcheck in partnership with Extentia to provide insights and recommendations that revive, refine, and transform your Salesforce Org. Learn more about healthcheck here. If you’d like to discuss how we can work together to better align your Org with your business goals – let’s chat.
About the Author: Cameron Avrigean
Cameron Avrigean is a Marketing Coordinator at fivestar*. Cameron is an analytics fanatic with a penchant for copywriting and social media. He works with the marketing team to create engaging content, and is looking for the next big thing. Cameron holds a B.S. in Business Management from Point Park University.