Spring Six Pack: Top features of Spring ’24 Salesforce release

New Year, New Salesforce Release.  

The Spring ’24 release of Salesforce is set to go live in Production on either 2nd  or 9th of February 2024, depending on your exact location. If you aren’t sure which date applies to you, you can find out from the Salesforce Trust site. As is traditional, we will be running another of our world-famous release webinars to cover the great (and not so great) changes and enhancements that are on their way, on 7th February 2024 at 4pm (GMT) – sign up here if you haven’t already! 

We never like to make you wait until webinar day for a sneak peek at the good stuff, so here is the Spring Six Pack – our pick of the most exciting features: 

1. Rich Text/Image Widgets in Lightning Dashboards 

   Dashboard components are being renamed to Widgets, and there are a couple of additions that you can use to enhance the user experience with custom text and embedded images. You can add narrative text, explanatory notes, flow diagrams, and even animated GIFs to guide users through your analytics data.

2. Dynamic Forms in the Lightning App Builder 

   Dynamic Forms now support up to two levels of related object fields (excluding polymorphic relationships). No more burning formula fields just to bring information from a parent or sibling record into the page layout. You can also set field visibility by device, pushing just a few headline fields to mobile users while still allowing desktop users to see chapter and verse.

3. Einstein Call Explorer 

   This release introduces a new Generative AI feature called Einstein Call Explorer. In a Video Call record, you can click the Explore Conversation button and pose natural language questions for Einstein to answer. Note that this feature currently supports English-language calls only.

4. Seller Home 

   Seller Home is a new Home page designed specifically for your Sales team members. It displays an overview of their Opportunities, Accounts, Leads, and Contacts, as well as their agenda for the day. Users can also set goals and track their progress, view to-do items, recent records, and receive contact suggestions from Einstein. If you have already created a custom Home page for Sales, Sales Console, or Sales Engagement, you’ll need to manually enable Seller Home.

5. Einstein Work Summaries 

   Einstein Work Summaries is a new Generative AI feature for Service Cloud users. It provides AI-generated summaries of voice calls and enhanced messaging sessions. By mapping Summary, Issue, and Resolution fields to a Salesforce object and adding the Einstein Field Recommendations component to the Voice Call/Messaging Session record page, agents can easily review, edit, and save the values generated by Einstein once the session ends.

6. Null Coalescing Operator in Apex 

   No release blog of mine would be complete without one for the pro-coders. There’s a new operator in town, and it looks like ‘??’.  The null coalescing operator allows you to replace if/then/else null checks with a single line of code. The left-hand operand is evaluated, and if the result is null, the right-hand operand is then evaluated and the result is used. 

For example:

Date startDate=activityDate ?? System.today(); 

If activityDate is non-null, startDate will be set to that value, otherwise it will default to today.

And in a Colombo-close, there’s one more thing that I have to cover:

• Scratch Org Snapshots – BETA 

  A snapshot is a point-in-time copy of a Scratch Org that includes installed packages, custom metadata configuration, and data. This feature can be used to create a new Scratch Org with the identical configuration and data present, saving you hours of setup work.

If this has fired you up to learn more about the rest of the Spring ‘24 release, be sure to sign up for the webinar now. Also, don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel so you never miss one in the future!