Summer’22 Release Review

The Salesforce Summer’22 Release has been available since May 21st and brought a lot of updates to the platform. Reading the vast Release Notes may seem complicated to catch up on all the new improvements. We already had time to review all the updates Salesforce brought with the Summer’22 Release. If you’re looking for a summary of the changes Salesforce had, you came to the right spot: after 590 pages of great reading, find everything you must know about the release below.

I used to read all the Release Notes and gather a summary for the Stellaxius team! We found it’s the best way to conquer value in these improvements and apply them to our client’s projects. Get to read this article to see my perspective on the Salesforce Summer’22 Release. Find the table of contents below:

1. Main highlights on the Salesforce Summer’22 Release
2. How to learn from the Release Notes?
3. Overall evaluation

 

1. Main highlights on the Salesforce Summer’22 Release

The first topic to speak about is Salesforce Unlimited. As presented at the London World Tour, some of the features seen as add-ons are now part of the Sales Cloud Unlimited license: Einstein Activity Capture, Pipeline Inspection, Sales Engagement (formerly High Velocity Sales), Inbox, Sales Cloud Einstein, Salesforce Meetings, and Einstein Conversation Insights.

Past releases had shown a consistent concern with the platform and data hygiene, and this release was no different from that. In my opinion, Field Service is probably the tool Salesforce has been investing more on with many new features released.

Salesforce Industries was a big focus of this release, and some new products were added: DevOps Centre and the Net-Zero Cloud. Regarding performance, there’s no significant improvement at all.

Flows didn’t have many improvements this time, but they are the way to go, with the Migration tool for flows being extended. Also, released on June 15th, the Messaging for In-App and Web on Service Cloud seems like the way to centralise how you manage messaging from web, experience or mobile to the customer. Service Cloud had more new features than in the previous release.

 

2. How to learn from the Summer’22 Release Notes?

There are some ways you may find to learn the Release Notes and apply them to your specific needs:

• Salesforce Summer’22 Release webpage: quick links for demos per clouds
• Salesforce Summer’22 Release in a box: a 117-pages presentation, with one single feature per page and very easy to read
• Trailhead for Summer’22 Release
• Salesforce Summer’22 Release Notes: the 590 pages document with the full comprehensive release notes

 

3. Overall evaluation of the Summer’22 Release notes

Of the 322 updates of the Salesforce platform, 76%% of the changes apply just to the Lightning version and 24% to the Classic version. There are also some enhancements worth speaking about before diving deep into the significant updates of the Summer’22 release.

Now, a new custom field mimics the standard address fields. It allows for a Google lookup search of the address instead of keying in. The Custom Address Fields is still beta but is a good backlog item to add to all backlogs.

You can now share Individual Campaigns with colleagues in Lightning. This was one feature that wasn’t yet migrated to Lightning and was available in Classic. A campaign is managed by org wide settings; sometimes, the campaign owner may want to share campaigns with specific users that do not have visibility.

Also, say hi to the Search Manager. A new configuration panel for Einstein Search allows us to see and configure which objects and fields are searchable. This configuration appropriately done will make end users’ search feature more accurate with fewer unnecessary results.

The Knowledge Search is finally going-live and with several excellent features. The Natural Language Search is now available for Knowledge articles as well. You can now receive answers to your questions, not just article links, using Einstein Search Answers. Although this is still in pilot, it’s an exciting feature. Asking questions on search, will search articles in your knowledge and provide you with the actual answer to your question instead of a link. This will speed up the resolution of cases, for example. You can also filter Knowledge Articles Search from Experience Cloud sites.

In what concerns Pipeline Inspections, you can now close more deals with new insights sources and recommended actions in Einstein Deal Insights. It includes more information about service cases, activities and opportunity stage. Also, the Pipeline Inspection permissions have changed. Pipeline Inspection is now part of the Sales Cloud included license, and continues to be available at no extra cost in Performance and Unlimited editions. To ensure continued use of Pipeline Inspection, reassign users to the Pipeline Inspection Included permission set. This change is recommended in the Salesforce Summer’22 Release, and could become required in a later release.

Collaborative Forecast had minor changes compared to the previous releases. However, there was one enhancement quite relevant. You can now choose more opportunity fields to include or exclude from your forecasts. In the last release, it was possible to contain or exclude forecast records based on record type. Now the functionality has expanded to other fields as picklist values (e.g. compare new business with renewals).

Related to Activities, you can now spot overdue tasks right away. Overdue dates are now in red by default, making it easier to spot them. Also, you can focus on insights faster with a unified layout – insights are now easier to read with the new layout.

Finally, Inbox is now part of the Sales Cloud license (Unlimited), but it’s still unclear what happens to previously bought licenses.

 

4. Performance

Performance Assistant is now available at the setup. This is definitely a concern of Salesforce, even if in this release no new major features were added. The recent releases have been prolific in new ways to monitor and improve overall performance. Now there is an assistant that helps organisations to set their scalability and performance processes.

 

5. Salesforce Surveys & Feedback Management

There’s a new matrix question that will allow faster completion.

It allows for more personalised surveys – for example, you can add your logo to the survey, or you can customise the Thank You page.

 

6. Salesforce Meetings

Salesforce meetings permissions have changed. It is now part of the Sales Cloud Included license, and continues to be available at no extra cost in Performance and Unlimited editions. To ensure continued use of the Salesforce Meetings features, reassign users to either the Salesforce Meetings Included permission set, or Sales Cloud Included Bundle permission set.

 

7. Training and Adoption

Now in Summer’22 Release, you have in-app guidance!

You can help more users succeed with targeted prompts. It is possible to apply prompts to more elements on Salesforce like Einstein Search or Action Buttons.

 

8. Revenue Intelligence

You can get Revenue Insights with or without Collaborative Forecasts enabled. Before Revenue Intelligence required Collaborative Forecast to be enabled, now, it doesn’t, and it uses the role hierarchy for the data rolled up.

 

9. Mobile

There were not many enhancements in the Summer’22 release.

You can access device contacts from a Lightning Web Component. Importing contacts from your device into Salesforce by creating a ContactsService API component is possible. This way, there is no need to key in a contact you already have on your phone. Also, you can view more forecast types in the Salesforce mobile app now.

 

10. Analytics

There’s a lot of concern with usability in how to create reports.

You can now easily find the right report type for new reports (GA). It’s now easier to pick a report type. On setup, it gives us more information on previous report types created so we can easily reuse them.

Another enhancement is that you can create reports based on selected Salesforce objects. It’s a much more intuitive way to choose Report Types to use. When creating a new report, filter report types by which objects you need to have included; it’s not enabled yet. You need to contact Salesforce support to have it.

Another feature worth mentioning was beta in the Spring’22 Release. Now you can edit multiple fields inline on the report run page. You can update multiple fields on the page and save them all in one go.

Also, summary functions now include median. Before, it only had sum, average, minimum and maximum.

You can also manage your reports and dashboards in Analytics Home, for a more efficient way to manage them. This is still a beta version of the feature.

 

10.1. CRM Analytics (formerly Tableau CRM) in Summer’22 release

Salesforce keeps looking for the right name for this feature. It started as Einstein Analytics, then Tableau CRM and now CRM Analytics.

There are new versions of Remote Connectors. Salesforce keeps updating its existing connectors to new versions with additional security concerns.

As per previous releases, it is noticed a concern for Salesforce and Tableau products to be more compatible and more integrated with each other, so Tableau online enhanced its compatibility.

Also, you customise local Salesforce field metadata. Now, from the data manager, it is possible to align the metadata from Salesforce into CRM Analytics. This will allow for better mapping of data types and default values and improve data synchronisation quality.

When running multiple recipes, use Staged Data as output, instead of a dataset. This will make your sequential recipes run faster.

A new tool to migrate the old Dataflows into Recipes was created. You can now convert them. Also, you can combine unrelated records with Cross Join – it pairs every row from one dataset with a row from a different dataset.

There are new templates and apps! As always, Salesforce enhances existing pre-built apps and adds new ones each release:

• New Customer Insights Opportunity Embedded Dashboard
• New Customer Insights Sales Performance Dashboard
• Monitor the Order Journey with Order Tracking Analytics

There were also many other more minor enhancements like:

• Additional configuration of fiscal metadata on data prep
• Increased accuracy when rounding numbers on append
• Enhanced Search functionalities for your data, components, and steps within your recipes
• Refine Date Filtering Using Relative Dates
• Automate Adding All Columns to an Input Node
• Add filters to embedded Dashboards

Finally, there are new functions for future predictions with SQL and SAQL.

 

11. Einstein Activity Capture

Regarding EAC, you can manage associations between automatically captured emails and related records. It is possible to override the automatic association of emails in Salesforce if it is considered unrelated.

You’re now able to see more info when sensitive or automated emails aren’t shared automatically and discover lead objections sooner with a new Einstein email insight – when an email contains an objection made by a customer, it highlights it as a unique insight.

You can also get EAC in Performance and Unlimited editions without an add-on license.

 

12. Einstein

There are some updates regarding Einstein in Summer’22 release.

Einstein Conversation Insights is an exciting feature from Salesforce, that keeps evolving and now can be free for some orgs. Also, Sales Cloud Unlimited and Performance editions include Einstein Conversation Insights without an add-on license.

Also, get notifications and information about follow-up items, see call questions automatically with questions insights and comment on video call segments.

 

13. Einstein Discovery

The main concern of Einstein’s Discovery new features is finding ways to have more completed data analysed. This has been a concern from the past releases already:

• Reveal untapped insights from your unstructured data (GA): Tableau CRM keeps on trying to improve the quality of data analysis of unstructured data (social media, Surveys, …). This feature, as Pilot’s last release, “Text Clustering”, removes all the non-key words such as “a”, “the”, … to try to structure the actual valuable information that is coming on this data feeds.
• Fine-tune prediction accuracy with trending data (GA): this is an exciting feature. Now it is possible to add trend analysis to the predictions. For example, if we are analysing the purchases of coats, they are expected to sell the most in the Winter. If your discovery project is being built around summer, likely, it won’t consider that based on current data.
• Handle missing values in your datasets (GA): there is no data analysis without data. For fields in a blank Data Set, we can ask Discovery to fill them based on previous model executions.
• Package, promote, and distribute your stories (Pilot): this feature was needed. It will be possible to package stories in sandboxes and encourage them to produce using change sets. All these changes before had to be done directly in production
• Handle data quality issues during story creation: Einstein Discovery now alerts you of data quality issues before a story runs instead of after. Previously, you needed a completed story to reveal data quality issues that exist in your data, repair the issue, and then run the story again.
• Minimize disparate impact in live data (pilot): data quality concerns are essential for CRM Analytics; here is another exciting tool to validate if the data that we are predicting with Einstein Discovery is not biased. (e.g. data collected for the story contains 80% of male vs female records).
• Handle missing numerical values in your datasets: It is possible to impute missing numerical values in a dataset, with statistical imputation. For example, suppose the profit column in a retail store dataset is missing many values. With imputation, you can replace those missing values with values derived from other data, such as the average profit per store by the square foot or city. The result? You get more observations with predictions.
• Bring data to every conversation with CRM Analytics for Slack (beta): Still in beta, integration with slack is expanding to analytics too. It will be possible to add insights from analytics into Slack.

 

14. Customisations/NFR

Regarding customisations/NFR, you can now preserve user access to personal information fields. This is a relevant change toward GDPR compliance and security. Users with View All Data and View All Users can no longer view personal information. To give access to personal information, assign the View Concealed Field Data Permission, which replaces the View User Records with PII permission.

Salesforce has also improved picklist management and its data quality quite a lot in this release with four quick improvements:

• Get a list of custom picklist fields with inactive values: receive an email notification if a custom picklist field has more than 4.000 inactive values.
• Clean up inactive picklist values (beta): still beta, but Salesforce is working on a simple way to bulk delete inactive values.
• Bulk manages picklist values (beta): still beta, but it will be possible to delete, activate, deactivate, or replace multiple custom picklist field values simultaneously. Previously, you modified them one at a time. 
• Learn which picklist values are duplicates: a more descriptive message to let us know which picklist value we are trying to add is the duplicate one. Before, we didn’t know which and had to do trial and error.

Also, you can now customise and filter related lists in the Lightning App builder. It is now possible to configure dynamic related lists from the lightning app builder instead of the page layout editor.

There are new functions that can be used on formula fields. Most of them are related to date and time; now, you can strengthen formulas with new functions.

You can enable third-party integrations with Light DOM (beta). Lightning web components render in shadow DOM by default, providing strong encapsulation but posing challenges for global styling and many third-party integrations. With Light DOM it is possible to apply global styling and custom branding to components and child components easily.

Secure your Apex code with user mode database operations (beta). Apex runs at the system mode level, meaning every Apex code can query all data without restriction. Now it is possible to run it in user mode, which will apply all the user-specific access permissions to the queries that are run (sharing rules, field level security, etc.). This can be relevant to restrict what is being run and by whom.

You can get fairer resources when running Apex tests. Apex classes will probably run faster as Salesforce distributes and optimises its testing resources.

 

15. Salesforce Flow

Mulesoft Composer for Salesforce is now Flow Integration!

In the Flow Builder, you can add custom icons apex-defined invocable actions. To further customise the flow experience, adding a .svg file or selecting a standard Salesforce Lightning Design System (SLDS) icon is now possible and making it an invocable method.

Now before activating a record-triggered flow, it is possible to run a test to validate if it fails or not at run-time. Before, it had to be done manually. With a flow test, you configure the test parameters and inputs one time. Each time you run the test, it uses the same configuration to evaluate the flow.

Also, two-column flow layouts are superseded by multicolumn screens, starting in Winter’23.

With the migrate to flow tool, you can now convert workflow rules to flows. The migrate to flow tool now supports more workflow rules into flows. In Spring ’22, the Migrate to Flow tool supported workflow rules that contained these items:

• Field-based criteria
• Field updates
• Email alerts
• Outbound messages
• Time-dependent workflow actions

In Summer ’22, the Migrate to Flow tool now also supports:

• Equaltonull
• Not equal to null
• Rule criteria formula
• Not Supported yet: formulas that use Hour, Minute, Second, TimeNow, TimeValue, IsClone, or $RecordType

Also, you can send screen flows to Slack with an invocable action (beta).

Finally, some light changes to Flow Orchestrations. For example, it’s now possible to deploy orchestrations with Change Set.

 

16. Security/Shield

There is a roadmap to enforce MFA for the orgs that are still not using it. There are MFA-Exempt use cases that will allow users without MFA:

• User accounts for test automation tools, such as Selenium, Cucumber, or Appium
• User accounts for Robotic Process Automation (RPA) systems
• Logins using a certificate service that requires a PIN before users can select or receive a user certificate (for example, when logging in with a PIV or CAC card)
• Logins using a combination of a trusted device and a trusted network

It is now possible to use Microsoft as an authentication provider for Salesforce orgs and Experience Cloud sites.

Another update is that you can monitor changes to permission sets and permission set groups in Event Monitoring. It was beta the last release. Now it can monitor who is granting permission sets and permission set groups to avoid sending the wrong permissions. It can be prevented or warned by setting transaction policies. These permissions can be monitored: Assign Permission Sets, Author Apex, Customize Application, Manage Encryption Keys, Manage Internal Users, Manage Password Policies, Manage Profiles and Permission Sets, Manage Roles, Manage Sharing, Manage Users, Modify All Data, Password Never Expires, Reset User Passwords and Unlock Users, View All Data.

Also, you can track API usage for API versions 31-49. This is relevant as if there are processes with such old API versions still in use, they should be migrated to a more recent API Version. This API Total Usage event type also allows you to debug better and understand what is being processed in your org. Plus, get more complete EPT metrics for your Lightning pages. There are now three new fields that can be tracked when analysing the performance of a page.

• EFFECTIVE_PAGE_TIME_DEVIATION field to see if a page encounters issues loading.
• EFFECTIVE_PAGE_TIME_DEVIATION_REASON what is the specific cause?
• EFFECTIVE_PAGE_TIME_DEVIATION_ERROR_TYPE to identify if errors originate with your system or on the customer’s end

Finally, you can append data to Event Monitoring analytics app datasets (beta). Before adding more datasets to Event Monitoring, we had to request them from Salesforce.

 

17. External Services/Salesforce Connect

Regarding External Services, you can now call external services registrations natively from Apex. Previously, actions created through External Services were exposed exclusively for invocation through Flow or Einstein Bots.

You can also update an existing schema connected to flow. If registration is in use by a flow, now you can update it with a new, compatible API specification version. Previously, you couldn’t edit a registered schema used by a flow. If the new schema version isn’t compatible, the editing workflow notifies you which operations and schema objects are in use by which flows and by which Apex classes.

In Salesforce Connect, there are two new connectors: Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon Athena. The information retrieved by AWS can be seen as native Salesforce:

• View and edit data with record pages, related lists, and more.
• Define object relationships for data captured in single-table or multi-table design patterns.
• Access DynamoDB data mapped to external objects programmatically via SOQL and Apex, including DML.

 

18. High Velocity Sales

There were nearly no new features in Summer’22 release, but some relevant to be part of the Sales Cloud Unlimited license.

Sales Cloud Unlimited and Performance editions now include High Velocity Sales without an add-on license. Also, Sales Engagement is the new name for High Velocity.

Finally, you can see related sales cadence in task reports.

 

19. Experience Cloud

There are not much of new features in Experience Cloud.

You can now create multilingual LWR sites. Sites can now be in more than 20 languages, without having to make several versions per language. It also detects, based on localisation, which language to use automatically instead of the default one.

There are some usability enhancements in Experience Builder, with several improvements to be easier to configure the Experience Cloud. Also, you can use flows in LWE sites, which wasn’t possible before.

 

20. Net Zero Cloud

Carbon pricing is an instrument that captures the external costs of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions – the costs of emissions that the public pays for, such as damage to crops, health care costs from heat waves and droughts, and loss of property from flooding and sea level rise — and ties them to their sources through a price, usually in the form of a price on the carbon dioxide (CO₂) emitted. A price on carbon helps shift the burden for the damage from GHG emissions back to those who are responsible for it and who can avoid it. Instead of dictating who should reduce emissions where and how, a carbon price provides an economic signal to emitters, and allows them to decide to either transform their activities and lower their emissions, or continue emitting and paying for their emissions. On the Net Zero Cloud, you’re now able to:

• Create building energy intensity benchmark: track and benchmark how much energy each building consumes and get a reliable auditable carbon inventory.
• Monitor your carbon footprint with Net Zero analytics: a dashboard to monitor and analyse carbon emissions from building energy and suppliers emissions and their sustainability efforts
• Reduce your carbon footprint with energy consumption predictions: get predictions about how much energy your stationary assets consume. Minimise your carbon footprint by comparing the predicted and current energy consumption data, analysing the top contributing factors, and reviewing recommendations to decrease energy consumption.

 

21. Pardot

There were not many new updates on Pardot. However, there are some enhancements worth mentioning.

You can now automate better with completion action enhancements. It’s now possible to apply completion actions to a subset of prospects who meet the specified conditions. For example, assign prospects who live in Lisbon to User A and prospects who live in London to User B when they fill out your form.

Regarding Slack, due to the integration with Pardot (it was beta last releases), you can get notifications in Slack from Pardot, for example, send new leads, based on criteria, to sales users in Slack.

Another update is that Pardot Drip programs are being retired.

You can now review email bounce data in one report and get improved mailability insights on list email reports. Also, the enhanced landing page experience continues to evolve with new improvements.

 

22. Field Service

Field Service has several new features! Speaking about Field Service Resource Management, there were five updates worth mentioning:

• Enhanced scheduling and optimisation: this is a more efficient way to manage schedules, replacing the existing optimisation functionality, which is more manual or semi-automatic.
• get more accurate travel time predictions with travel modes: travel modes take into consideration transportation type (car, light truck, heavy truck, bicycle or walking) and other considerations such as road tolls or transportation of hazmat (hazard materials), to perform better schedule.
• account for holiday closures: consider holiday periods on the dispatcher console.
• explore the impact of optimisation with Optimization Hub (beta): this is an exciting feature that will allow monitoring optimisations made to resource utilisation, response time and travel time.
• bundle service appointments: several optimisations to use this feature are available since the last release.

On the other hand, when speaking about Field Service Asset Management, assets have some new fields and small configurations available. For instance, new work order generation status (to understand which WOs require attention), address for the location of the asset and total discount to service contracts.

Regarding Field Service Customer Engagement, you’re now able to let customers sign reports on their personal devices, get more from the real-time location component and hear what customers have to say about their experience with your company.

Finally, speaking about the Field Service Mobile! Backoffice workers can change the status of mobile workers, with appointment status changes being easier to use. Also, you can limit mobile workers’ location tracking for appointment assistants. There were also some usability enhancements to the mobility tool.

 

23. Service

Concerning Service, you can add flexibility and power with messaging for in-app and web! This feature delivers enhanced pre-chat support to pinpoint customer needs and access records before the agent connects in the Service Console.

Also, you can now customise your mobile app messaging experience.

 

I hope you have the chance to try some of the features the Summer’22 release brought to us! Also, if you’re looking for sales or marketing updates! Don’t forget to subscribe to our Knowledge Center to stay updated!