Six Plus One from the Winter ’24 Salesforce Release

Winter 24 went live in October 2024, bringing a host of cool new features and enhancements. As usual, we ran our traditional release webinar – if you missed it, you can view the recording of the webinar on demand. To whet your appetite for the main event, here’s the six GA features we’re most impressed with, and a beta that you’ll want to keep an eye on.

Generally Available

1. Select all the fields! 

   An absolute game changer in terms of productivity when creating permission sets. When you have a custom sObject with 500 fields and you need to give a user access to all bar 2, you no longer have to check 498 boxes individually. You can simply check the box next to the Read/Edit access title and all fields will be selected, then remove the 2 that shouldn’t be accessible.   

2. Lightning Web Component API Versioning 

   One for the developers. From API 58.0 (Summer ‘23 release), the API specified in a Lightning Web Component’s js-meta.xml file will drive the behaviour of the component. For example, specifying 59.0 will allow the component to take advantage of new features available in Winter ‘24, while specifying 58.0 will cause it to revert to the Summer ‘23 behaviour. This is useful when a release requires changes to existing components and you don’t have enough time available to fix up all of them.   

3. Selective Sandbox Access 

   Another time saver – create a Public Group to define who needs access to a sandbox, and once it’s created/refreshed, their users will be active and their email addresses will not be changed. Simply put, those users can access the sandbox immediately without waiting for an Administrator to set them up, while still ensuring that everyone else can’t inadvertently login.   

4. Flow Reactive Components 

   After a couple of releases in beta, reactive components are now available to everyone. Reactive components allow you to wire the output of one component up to the input of another and react when changes occur. The reaction might be to change the options available in a picklist, highlight entries in a table, and with custom LWC components, just about any UI effect you can think of.  Completing a flow in a small number of reactive screens rather than stepping through many pages and supplying individual values will certainly improve the user experience.   

5. Einstein Generative AI 

   A number of features across Sales and Service cloud, including Call Summaries, Sales Emails, Service Replies and Work Summaries. Let Einstein create the first draft to improve the productivity of your reps, while the Einstein Trust Layer ensures your data remains secure and the drafts are safe to use.    

6. Contact/Lead Intelligence View 

   View key metrics, carry out actions, and update records directly from the Lead or Contact tab. See who needs attention or isn’t engaging with your team. The new Intelligence View provides much more functionality than the existing List View, and there’s no need to drill down into specific records.

Beta

Permission Set Summary  Another win for the permission sets product team – this allows you to view enabled object, user, and field permissions in one place, rather than having to click through multiple sub-pages and consolidate those yourself in a spreadsheet. You can also view which Permission Set Groups the Permission Set has been added to, helping you to understand the impact of changes.