Release Readiness Live: Highlights from the Spring '23 Admin Preview

Hello Everyone, and welcome to the first edition of Ragamuffin Admin in it's new form. If you're reading this post, you will know that I recently went through a bit of a rebrand with my blog, now pivoting over to a blog purely covering Flow called The Flow Architect. This change, while in many ways feeling like the right move, has left a bit of a gap in the production of non-Flow Salesforce Admin related content. And as many of you reading this might already know, Salesforce Admin is something very near and dear to my heart, as I spent over 5 years working in the nonprofit space as a Salesforce Administrator before moving on from pure Admin and into the consultancy space. Now while I'm a Salesforce Consultant these days, in many ways I still consider myself to be an #AwesomeAdmin at heart. So I still want to be able to produce Admin content from time to time, even though I love Flow and feel that is the right move for my content production.

This leads me to this brief announcement in this post. The announcement I want to make today is that along with my work on The Flow Architect blog, I will also continue to use the Ragamuffin Admin handle that I have built up over the last two years. However, I will be transitioning that to a LinkedIn newsletter that I will publish based on when I have something Admin/Community related to share. For transparency, the newsletter is listed to go out on a monthly basis, but that may not be the reality. I will be posting when I have something to share that fits more with the Ragamuffin Admin handle than The Flow Architect one. Basically, if it's about Flow, check out The Flow Architect. If it is more general and Admin related, check out this LinkedIn newsletter (which you should be able to subscribe to).

But that's enough waffle from me. Let's get into what this post is really about.

Admin Preview Live - Spring '23

This past Friday we saw the airing of the Spring '23 Admin Preview. For those who may not be aware, every year during each of the three seasonal release cycles for Salesforce (Spring, Summer and Winter), there are various webinars released by Salesforce providing highlights of the upcoming release for a number of different categories, including Admins, Developers and Sales/Service ... just to name a few. Traditionally on my blog I would cover both the Admin Preview and the Flow Preview. This will continue to be the case going forward, with the Flow preview post going on my new blog and my post on the Admin preview being shared via this LinkedIn newsletter. So in this post I will be going over the Admin preview, I'll share my thoughts on some of the biggest announcements to come out of it. And in this particular release, there is a good amount to talk about.

Please note, that these posts are never an extensive summary of the webinar or of the release. Rather, they cover my standout highlights and thoughts on them. If you want more in-depth analysis I'd encourage checking out blogs on the release from the likes of Salesforce Ben . These posts are just for highlights.

Please also note, that due to the release of my Flow Preview highlights post, this post will not include any Flow highlights. If you want to see any Flow highlights from this release, please check out my post that will go live later this week or check out other Spring '23 related from the community or posted by Salesforce.

If you want to check out the Admin Preview yourself, you can do so by checking out the link shown below. Here you can get access to the full webinar recording.

#1: The Retirement Plan for the End of Permissions on Profiles

You heard that right! We now have an approximate date for the end of life of permissions on profiles. Now just to be clear, this doesn't mean that Profiles are being retired, it is explicitly permissions at the Profile level that are being retired. What this in practice means is that permissions will be expected to be set at the Permission Set and Permission Set Group level. Specifically this will mean that companies will need to review their security management needs for their orgs to get them in line with the updated standard going forward. The plan to eventually retire permissions on Profiles was first announced at TrailblazerDX '22 back in April, but up until now we did not have a retirement plan. In my view as a long time Admin, I feel it is really important to have a timeline for sizeable changes like this, even if it is an approximate one. Having a timeline means that Admins can plan ahead and put the work in to get things sorted before the retirement takes effect. I remember pushing for a timeline for the retirement of Process Builder and Workflow Rules at Dreamforce '21 after it was announced on the Winter '22 Admin Preview shortly before the event. After my question was picked up for True to the Core, we received an official timeline for the retirement, and while it has changed a little bit over the last year and a bit, we have a frame of reference that will help Admins map out and plan the migration of their automation to Flow. Us having a timeline for the retirement of permissions on profiles will allow Admins to do the same with their security setup and configuration ahead of the retirement.

N.B. I won't cover the proposed framework for how we use Permission Sets and Permission Set Groups to handle security going forward. However, both Cheryl Feldman and Louise Lockie have talked about this extensively in talks before.

The current End of Life (EOL) date is anticipated for around the time of the Spring '26 update. Based on this date, the expected EOL for permissions on profiles will be sometime between January and February 2026 depending on your org instance. I have no doubt that more information will come over the next 3 years, providing us with more insight and details on the current retirement plan.

N.B. There will be an option to turn off the ability to use permissions on profiles ahead ... this functionality is anticipated to go live in the Spring '24 release. You can get more information on the retirement in the Spring '23 Permission Updates post that was released on the Salesforce Admin blog on 16 January 2023.

#2: Dynamic Forms is Available for 2 New Objects and Mobile

Dynamic Forms is a huge piece of work that has been ongoing for a number of years now. Back in the summer of 2020, we saw the launch of Dynamic Forms for Custom Objects on Desktop. Since that time much of the conversation on the future of Dynamic Forms has specifically related to two key talking points.

Those two key conversation points being:

• When will we get Dynamic Forms for Standard Objects?
• When we we get Dynamic Forms for Mobile Devices?

The Winter '23 release saw the first of these two questions beginning to be answered when we saw Dynamic Forms come to Accounts, Contacts and Opportunities. In this release we will see the rollout continue as we will be getting Dynamic Forms on both the Case and Lead standard object. This is actually one more object than was originally planned, as we were originally only going to get Dynamic Forms for the Lead object. So in this release, we're getting a bonus to the original roadmap with Dynamic Forms also arriving for the Cases object.

On top of the addition of Dynamic Forms coming to Leads and Cases in this release. We're also getting Dynamic Forms on Mobile ... well, sort of. Basically there is a pilot going live for Dynamic Forms on Mobile. This is acting as a Sandbox Pilot with customers being able to request access to join the pilot. Dynamic Forms for Mobile is expected to move into a public Beta phase in the Summer '23 release later this year. So don't expect too much coverage on this feature until later this year when the Beta goes live in the Summer '23 release.

I could talk about Dynamic Pages all day ... but let's leave it at that for now! So to close off this section, I've left the timeline that was shared or reference above.

#3: DevOps Center is Now Generally Available!!!

DevOps really feels like the talk of the town across the Salesforce ecosystem. While it is true that DevOps has been a big talking point for quite a while now, it certainly feels like it has become much more of a talking point over the last 12 months. This in part is due to the release of Salesforce's in-house approach to DevOps which is designed to replace Change Sets (many Admins love that).

This new approach from Salesforce is known as DevOps Center. Honestly, I haven't been able to have a thorough investigation of the tool as of yet due to certain requirements which need to be met in order to use DevOps Center.

So while I can't talk in-depth about DevOps Center myself, I still feel that the fact that DevOps Center is now Generally Available in this release deserves it's own section within this highlights post. There is a number of posts that cover how to use DevOps Center that has been put together by the Trailblazer Community. So please do go and check out content on DevOps Center if you want to know more.

#4: So Much Love for Salesforce Mobile

In this Admin Preview, we got to hear about a lot of updates that are coming to the Salesforce Mobile App for both iOS and Android. Like a number of people reading this post, I've not really delved too much into the Salesforce Mobile App because of historic challenges with it. So I've personally not really strayed from using the desktop app. That being said, there's a bunch of updates that have come as part of this most recent seasonal release for the Salesforce Mobile App.

Some of the standard updates for this release include:

• Enhanced Reports (GA)
• Enhanced Contacts (Beta)
• Dynamic Forms (Pilot)

There are a ton of other updates to the Salesforce Mobile App that were covered in the Admin Preview. Some of the features highlighted for coming releases that really stood out among the pack is the Salesforce Mobile App Plus and an update called Mobile Offline which will seek to provide a user experience for users to allow them to be able to access the app and some of its functionality offline.

#5: More Good Enhancements to Reports and Dashboards

One of the areas I've felt a little out of the loop in over the last few releases due to my focus on Flow is the updates to Reports and Dashboards that come with each seasonal release. In recent years we've seen some really big and valued updates to Reports and Dashboards such as the ability to edit field values from a report and the unique value counter that came quite a while back now.

For reports in particular, we will see three big updates for reports that will surely change the game considerably for companies who extensively use reporting.

The stand-out highlights for Report enhancements in this release include:

• Increase from 7 to 15 report subscriptions for Unlimited Orgs.
• Report Subscriptions is now able to be reported on in Salesforce.
• $User can be used as a relative filter in Reports.

N.B. If you don't use an Unlimited Org in your company, you can still request the higher number of report subscriptions. To do this you will just need to raise a new Support Case and request to be bumped to the new 15 subscription limit.

Like with the Report Enhancements in this release, we also find ourselves getting some pretty sweet updates to Dashboards in this upcoming seasonal release. You'll be no doubt glad to know that the relative $User filter that is coming to Reports in this release will be able to use this same filter in their Dashboards.

This release sees two new widgets coming to Dashboards. Those widgets being a Rich Text widget and an Image widget. These two widgets will allow Admins be able to add Rich Text and Images to their Dashboards. There will be a number of different use cases that would benefit from these two new widgets, but the first thing that jumps out to me for them is documentation and guidance. These two new widgets will be of a great benefit to a sizeable number of Salesforce Admins.

#6: Updates to Picklists and Picklist Management

The final update I wanted to highlight (there's just so many to choose from) is the enhancements coming to Picklist Management in this next seasonal release. Last year, we saw a number of great updates relating to picklists including the ability to manage picklist values in bulk easier than what was possible before.

The two biggest updates in this release is that the ability to Bulk Manage Picklist Values and the ability to Clean Up Inactive Picklist Values will both be GA as of the Spring '23 release. The ability to manage picklist values in Bulk was already released in Beta last year, but it is now going GA. I'm sure many a Salesforce Admin will love these two updates to Picklist Management coming in this release.

Closing Comments

So those are my highlights coming out of the Admin Preview this past Friday. Don't forget, there are multiple episodes of Release Readiness Live, all of which can be found via the link shown below this paragraph. Why not check them out?

Which update from the Spring '23 Release are you looking forward to seeing the most? Did it make my list? I'd love to hear your thoughts coming out of this edition of the Admin Preview for Release Readiness Live. So let me hear your thoughts in the comments below. And if you would like to be notified as soon as I publish a new LinkedIn article under Ragamuffin Admin, please do subscribe to the newsletter. You'll get a quick email whenever a new

Check out my latest post on my blog, The Flow Architect, via the link above. There will be two new posts coming to the blog this week, one which will be similar to this post but focused on the Flow release, and the other will be the finale to my brief series covering the Migrate to Flow tool created by Salesforce.