Salesforce Winter ‘24 – What Should Be on the Roadmap?
IdeaExchange Prioritization cycles are periods of time throughout the year when Salesforce product managers can pitch potential Salesforce features and enhancements. Salesforce professionals then vote for the ideas they believe will have the greatest impact – as a result, the Salesforce product development teams set out to deliver the winning ideas.
In other words, IdeaExchange Prioritization takes the user wish list and marries it up with reality – how Salesforce product development actually happens, taking complexity into account.
The current cycle (running until February 13, 2023) will tee up features for the Winter ’24 release. While this may sound a little futuristic, this is the release that will arrive later this year around October 2023 – as someone once said… Salesforce winter releases are not particularly winter-y!
During Prioritization, every Salesforce Trailblazer (member of the Salesforce Trailblazer community) is given 100 coins to spend. You can ‘spend’ these by allocating different amounts to multiple ideas according to how important each feature is to you.
Here are a selection of the future features you can choose to allocate your coins to. What do you want to see on the roadmap?
Salesforce Winter ‘24 Release Ideas
Make Lightning Experience Faster
- Idea details: Make LEX lightning fast
- Idea age: 7 years
- No. of points accrued: 59,550
Performance (page load time) has been a focus since organizations began transitioning from Salesforce Classic to Lightning. You only need to read ‘Lightning speed please!’ on the IdeaExchange to see how hot this topic is.
There are a range of factors that impact Salesforce page load times – some are in your control to improve, while others are down to the underlying framework leveraged by the Salesforce platform.
There are two initiatives to work towards solving this idea, should it be selected in the prioritization cycle:
- Salesforce EDGE: EDGE boosts network performance by sending network traffic to your instance over an optimized route.
- Aura → Lightning Web Components (LWC): Over time, the core Lightning codebase was being migrated over to LWC – a modern, standards-based UI framework. It’s a challenging process that started with the ‘heavy-weight’ components, and will trickle down to others over time.
“LWC has been well received in our developer community, with many partners reporting significant performance improvements when they migrated from Lightning Aura components… We’re investing heavily to improve things going forward, but it won’t happen overnight.”
– Stephan Morais, Salesforce
Improved Permission Set View
- Idea details: Improved Permission Set View
- Idea age: 11 years
- No. of points accrued: 7,760
This idea was originally submitted to the IdeaExchange by Cheryl Feldman, who, in a nice turn of events, is now the product manager overseeing profiles, permission sets, and all things to do with ‘object access’.
Permission sets gave us flexibility, avoiding the need to create an excessive number of profiles. An improvement for how we can view the permissions associated with each permission set is what’s being called for here (instead of clicking into each individual permission set, which is both time-consuming and prone to error).
The challenge was well summed up by one respondent on the idea thread:
“It would also be nice to see all of the permissions a user has – the profile permissions + all the permission sets they have – all at once instead of having to look through every permission set and their profile.” Source
This would be a big win, not only for admin productivity (and keeping one’s sanity!), but also for compliance reporting – for example, ISO27001, as one advocate for the idea raised.
Salesforce have announced that permissions on profiles have an end-of-life date (scheduled for the Spring ‘26 release).
So, are profiles dead? No, profiles aren’t going away. When setting up a user we will still need to select a profile, and there are a number of things that will remain on the profile, such as Login hours/IP ranges, default record type assignment, apps, and page layout assignment.
On the other hand, much will be managed by Permission Sets – user permissions (system and app permissions), object permissions (object Create, Read, Update, and Delete [CRUD]), and more.
“Cheryl has worked tirelessly to move permissions away from profiles into something more manageable – something that is easier for admins to manage overall.” Source
Dynamic Actions on Mobile for Standard Objects
- Idea details: Dynamic Actions on mobile for standard objects
- Idea age: 1 year
- No. of points accrued: 1,160
The future is all things ‘dynamic’: Dynamic Forms, Dynamic Interactions, and – the subject of this idea – Dynamic Actions.
Dynamic Actions enable admins to create uncluttered, intuitive, and responsive pages that display only the actions your users need to see based on the 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.
Currently, you can define different Dynamic Actions for mobile (versus desktop) for custom objects. This idea is advocating for this flexibility to be extended for standard objects.
Are you a fan of Dynamic Actions? If yes, spend some coins on this idea!
Custom Property Editors for Lightning App Builder
- Idea details: Custom Property Editors for Lightning App Builder
- Idea age: 2 years
- No. of points accrued: 2,720
“When adding custom components to Lightning Pages you should be able to take advantage of Custom Property Editors like you can with the Flow Builder… I have created multiple Lightning Web Components that are designed to be used both in a Flow Screen and on a Lightning Record Page. I now have to have two separate ways to configure the same component.” Source
This update would improve the admin UI for custom components configuration – all with reusability front of mind!
Timestamped Forecast Submissions
- Idea details: Timestamped Forecast Submissions
- Idea age: 6 years
- No. of points accrued: 580
Forecasting has been an area that Salesforce have been keen to improve over the past few years. With all the leaps and bounds in forecasting, it could now be time for Salesforce to work on better tracking of submitted forecasts. In other words, recording the date the forecast was submitted, and tracking any overrides made during the forecasting period.
To add more color, you can read about the custom workarounds that some people have created – admitting that the setup is not easy to manage, and therefore, not exactly sustainable.
Other Ideas up for Prioritization
- Sales: Improved Quota upload mechanism in Collaborative Forecasting.
- Interaction Studio: Personalization in CRM, Personalization Administrative APIs.
- Commerce/Retail Execution: Documentation updates for migration and deployment with Commerce, Simplify offline mobile app authentication.
Already Scheduled for the Winter ‘24 Release
- Idea details: Limit Increase for Report Subscribes
- Idea age: 6 years
- No. of points accrued: 90,390
- Currently users can only subscribe to seven reports (previously, it was limited to five).
- Subscribing to a report means that users receive updates as email notifications at a specific date and time. Optionally, conditions can be set to only send notifications when certain conditions are met, e.g. when the number of records in the report goes above ten.
- “The long-term solution will use our headless browser service, which will require rearchitecting the way subscriptions work.”
Summary
The current cycle will run until February 13, 2023. Get spending those coins to tee up features for the Winter ’24 roadmap (around October 2023) – happy voting!
If you’re interested in looking back at the outcome of some previous cycles, you can see examples of what was requested and prioritized before making it into the product roadmap.
