5 Tips Every Salesforce Admin Needs in 2023
With every release, Salesforce rolls out yet more incredible features and enhancements. As a Salesforce Administrator, it’s your responsibility to stay up to date on these key changes and continuously aim to review and enhance your Salesforce org. It’s not all about you though! There are also many new fun features that can enhance productivity for your users.
In 2023, I predict a focus on increasing ROI (return on investment), by optimizing your existing Salesforce setup to include the latest features and enhancements already at your disposal. In this article, I’ve put together my top five features every Salesforce Admin needs in 2023 to stay ahead of the curve and bring your Admin A-game!
1. Flow Builder
If there’s one feature particularly worth focusing on in 2023, it has to be Flow Builder. There’s no escaping the fact that admins armed with Flow Builder skills will be in high demand due to the retirement of Workflow Rules and Process Builder, and the need to migrate existing automations to Flow.
Mike Bogan of Hubbl Diagnostics, a product that uncovers technical debt, risks, and opportunities within Salesforce orgs, found that only about 12% of declarative automation has been migrated to Flow.
“This means there is ~19 million hours of workflow rule migration and ~5 million hours of process builder migration effort required across the entire Salesforce ecosystem.”
Mike Bogan, Director of Product Strategy at Hubbl Diagnostics
Those are some pretty daunting statistics, highlighting the importance of planning your Flow migration and upskilling, so that you are confident when creating flows.
If you’re wondering where to get started with your Flow migration, we have a free course to help!
Interested in a bit more in-depth training on Salesforce Flow? Check out our Ultimate Salesforce Flow Foundation Course.
2. Permission Sets
Salesforce has officially announced that permissions on Profiles have an end-of-life date!
Retirement is due in the Spring ‘26 release, and the following permissions that were previously managed via the Profile, will be moving into Permission Sets:
- User permissions (system and app permissions)
- Object permissions (object Create, Read, Update, and Delete [CRUD])
- Field permissions (field-level security [FLS])
- Tabs
- Record types (not defaults)
- Apps (not defaults)
- Connected app access
- Apex classes
- Visualforce pages
- Custom permissions
Cheryl Feldman, Director and Product Management, is pioneering plans to overhaul and drastically improve Permissions, Permission Sets, and Record Type Assignments.
As of Spring ‘23, there is a closed beta for User Access Policies, which is a way of migrating your user Profiles to Permission Sets and Permission Set Groups. You can participate in the closed beta here.
You can start to manage your Permission assignments with the recently renamed User Access and Permissions Assistant. This free app was created by Salesforce Labs, and is available on the AppExchange. It is designed to help you analyze and report on Permission assignments, as well as providing an easy wizard to manage permissions.
Keep an eye out in 2023 for enhancements to Permission Sets. They already underwent some significant upgrades in 2022, such as the ability to set field-level security for a Field on Permission Sets instead of Profiles.
I predict that we will continue to see plenty of changes to user management over the next few years, so this is a feature for admins worth paying attention to.
3. Dynamic Forms, Dynamic Actions, and Dynamic Related Lists
At a recent Salesforce Admin group I was hosting, I was surprised by how few people were using any of the Dynamic features in Salesforce Lighting Experience. Historically, I believe this is due to some considerations that made the use cases limited. For example, for a long time, Dynamic Forms was only available for custom objects.
There are a number of dynamic features available to you. They’ve all undergone significant enhancements over the past few releases:
In 2023, it might be time to revisit all of these features, and explore how they can help you create human-centered user experiences in Salesforce. In layperson’s terms, that’s creating responsive, intelligent pages that display the right information, at the right time, to the right user.
Dynamic Forms
Over time, the page layout, or “Details” section in Lightning pages can become congested with fields. These fields may well be necessary, but not all the time or to all users.
With Dynamic Forms you’ll be able to:
- Place fields anywhere on the layout without needing to add them to the traditional page layout (“Details” tab).
- Use visibility rules to make fields and components appear and disappear based on criteria you choose.
- Do away with multiple page layouts.
- Improve page load times.
Dynamic Forms are now available for several standard objects including Accounts, Contacts, Leads, Cases, and Opportunities!
Dynamic Actions
Dynamic Actions will enable you to create uncluttered, intuitive, and responsive pages that display only the actions your users need to see, based on criteria you specify.
Instead of scanning an endless list of actions, your users will be presented with a simple choice relevant to their role, profile, or when a record meets certain criteria.
Which actions are available, and when they appear, will be configured in the Lightning App Builder instead of the traditional page layout editor. This leads to reduced administrative time and effort.
Dynamic Related Lists
Related lists are great in general, right? They show you the records related to the record you are currently viewing. For example, I can see all Opportunities related to a specific Account.
However, if you have a lot of records, related lists can end up becoming slightly confusing long lists… Wouldn’t it be useful if you could have a related list that only showed open Opportunities? Or perhaps one that only showed Won Opportunities? I know my users would appreciate not having to wade through records, and instead be presented with the exact data they want.
Salesforce Dynamic Related Lists do exactly this, and even more. I can create filtered related lists and configure what fields are displayed in what order, and customize what actions are available. What’s more, the option to “View All” that was previously unavailable for Dynamic Related Lists, is now available!
4. DevOps Center
DevOps Center is the future of release management, bringing no-code, low-code, and pro-code Salesforce professionals together. It deploys changes using a point-and-click interface.
Generally available since December 2022, DevOps Center is free for all Salesforce customers, and is set to transform the way Salesforce teams work together.
“DevOps Center is all about change and release management and introducing DevOps best practices to our entire community, regardless of where you fall on the low-code to pro-code spectrum.”
Karen Fidelak, Salesforce DevOps Center Product Manager
Key features of Salesforce DevOps Center include:
Work Items: Introducing a new object to track the changes you are making. Work items will include the metadata items that are pushing through environments. Although, unlike change sets, work items are created once, and pushed through the pipeline stages.
Automated Change Tracking: As development teams make changes in their sandboxes, DevOps Center will automatically track the changes – meaning you have total transparency into which items need promoting through environments.
Pipelines: Prior to DevOps Center, Salesforce did not provide a way to define the pipeline of development environments. Now teams can create customized pipelines with their desired method of promoting changes.
Source Control: Source/Version control is a core part of modern DevOps best practices. Teams using DevOps Center can now integrate with GitHub source control, with full visibility of who changed what (and when). The integration is done through the DevOps Center interface, meaning deep knowledge of source control tools isn’t required.
DevOps is a new landscape for many Salesforce Admins, with plenty of new concepts and jargon to get used to. Salesforce DevOps Center is still very new, and we anticipate plenty of enhancements over the next few releases. Now is a good time to start getting to grips with the new way to deploy your changes.
5. Forecasts
Salesforce forecasting is a perfect example of an existing feature that could help increase your ROI and user adoption, without needing to purchase anything else. An often underutilized feature, forecasting in Sales Cloud has seen plenty of fantastic updates over the last few releases that have given it a new lease of life.
- More efficient forecast setup, combining Forecast Types and Forecast Settings into a single setup page.
- New forecast category “Most Likely”.
- Create core forecasting KPIs using two new out-of-the-box columns: Gap to Quota and Pipeline Coverage.
- Choose custom Opportunity fields to include or exclude from your forecasts.
- Customize cumulative rollup names to suit your business.
- View Quota Attainment % as a progress bar.
- Users can select “Show Changes in Last 7 Days” and will now see pertinent information in a single pop-up when they hover.
- Build custom forecast pages with the Lightning App Builder (Spring ‘23).
Summary
With every release, Salesforce gives us new features and enhancements to explore. As Admins, we should proactively keep up to date with all of these exciting changes. It is to ensure we are following best practices and utilizing Salesforce to get the greatest return on investment.
Do you have any other essential features for Salesforce Admins in 2023? Let us know in the comments!
