Alex Colburn – September 14, 2021
Salesforce Administrators are getting a lot of really great updates in the Winter ‘22 Release. Today, Andrew is covering three that he thinks will bring the most value.
Hello everybody. Andrew Davis here, senior developer at Digital Mass. Today we want to talk about some of the exciting administrative features that you can expect to come into your Salesforce production environment with the Salesforce Winter '22 updates. Of course, anything that we're going to talk about today, we do recommend that you take a look at these features in your sandbox. You can sign up for a free winter 22 preview developer edition org if you do not already have one of your existing sandboxes and the release preview date, we'll include a link to how you can sign up for those in the description below.
As far as administrative features go, the first thing we want to talk about is the extended support for inline editing in reports and dashboards and particular reports now include the ability to facilitate inline editing for lookups picklist fields and dates, which was previously unsupported. The Summer '21 release did include a lot of really exciting inline editing feature updates for reports; however, it wasn't comprehensive, and therefore, was not a full substitution or a potential replacement for inline editing in lists. With this update, we see that that's a lot more actualizable. It's much more likely that you'll be able to replace any inline editing that's happening in your list views today with those reports and dashboards, all of which of course reflect object and field-level security. It is still beta feature, so you can enable that under-report and dashboard settings in set up, just click enable inline report editing and, of course, test that in your sandbox before you deploy that change to production.
Next, we want to talk about in-app guidance and some of the user engagement features that Salesforce is pushing with the Winter '22 release. One that we're most excited about is targeted prompts now being available. If you've used in-app guidance before you've seen how helpful it can be for prompting users with some helpful tips or information, either docked in the corner of a page or floating somewhere in the bottom right-hand corner of the interface. It's convenient and it's helpful now that you can actually target and specify elements on the page that you want to direct their attention to. With this Winter '22 update, you can now create what are called targeted prompts, which allow you to select a component in lightning app builder, and create a prompt in a position that you defined relative to that component. It behaves just like standard in-app guidance.
You can provide a link, some helpful text, and a description for what it is that you're trying to cover. And that's all configurable, and actually, also filterable by record type. If you created on a record page, further supporting the in-app guidance and user engagement functionality is the ability to create in-app guidance now in setup as well. Now that targeted prompt functionality isn't supported in set up, however, you can still do the doc and floating prompts down on the right-hand corner. This is particularly helpful for developers or anybody who's working in a non-production environment. It will be helpful for those training up new admins or delegating access to admins who don't have a lot of experience with the platform. You can actually create those targeted prompts, deploy that to your production environment and level up. Those administrators are users who have access to set up more quickly.
The last thing that we want to talk about for winter '22, as far as administrative features go are dynamic interactions, dynamic interactions are going to be an incredible new feature. It's sort of hybridization of the developer and administrator role. This is a feature that is accessible through lightning app builder. As an administrator, you would partner with a developer who's building custom lightning web components for your interfaces. That developer has the ability to expose certain events that they can fire from within their component. When a user does something, say like click a button on a list, for instance, you can have that button click as an administrator. You can actually identify that in the lightning app builder interface, as you're configuring a component that you can configure that event to fire and interact with any other standard or customer book components on your record page. So some applications of that might be a user clicks, a button in a list. Then you, as the administrator say that when that list event is fired, maybe another map component you have elsewhere on the lightning record page can be triggered and take in information that is propagated through that event. It's all declarative, all click to build and requires no code from the administrator's point of view, but it allows you to do very interesting things with wiring events propagated from custom components to standard and other custom components on your page without having to do things like set up complex event listeners using the old sub model or the lightening message channel service. It's incredibly exciting feature. It is however, only available currently in the Salesforce winter '22 updates for lightning app pages. So this won't work for your record pages to start. It won't work for lightning home for your communities. We're hoping to see that that will be rolled out a little bit further as time progresses.
So this is going to do it for us here today. We're going to cover flows in the next video. We'll talk about some of the exciting changes that are being made there to help embolden administrators and the declarative development. Thank you.
The Developers Speak is a video series featuring certified Salesforce consultants at Digital Mass. They come to you twice a month to help bridge the gap between business problems and technical solutions.
About the Developer:
Meet Andrew Davis: Andrew joined the Digital Mass team as a Senior Salesforce Developer in August 2020. He came in with a few certifications on his belt and hasn't slowed down since. Andrew currently holds 10+ Salesforce certifications.
Outside of work, Andrew likes to spend his time playing D&D, camping, and burying himself in Youtube playlists exploring things ranging from emerging technologies to how to hand-sew your own socks - it’s pretty obvious he fits right in with the DM crew!