Welcome to my 2025 architect roundup! As the year is now over, I have curated a list of the Salesforce Architect articles you cherished most in last year, also featuring the important takeaways that made them so noteworthy.
Only posts that have been published or refreshed in 2025 are included, and I have ranked them by page views across the year. Release articles have been excluded from this list (they are always some of our top-performing posts – so give them a read if you haven’t already).
1. A Salesforce Admin’s Guide to Auditing Connected Apps
I know the title says “Admin,” but bear with me for just a moment! In light of the epic security issues in 2025, Tom Bassett created this very topical article. It’s a wake-up call for Salesforce Admins (and everyone else) to grab their virtual magnifying glasses and audit their Connected Apps.
It walks you through what Connected Apps are, how hackers have exploited them, and why it’s crucial to know which apps are genuinely safe in your org. From reviewing installed versus user-authorized apps, setting session timeouts, enforcing admin-approved access, and even using API Access Control, this guide gives you a step-by-step approach to lock down access and keep your Salesforce data safe.
Key insight: Connected Apps are a powerful tool, but can be a backdoor for hackers if not carefully monitored. Regular audits and following the principle of least privilege for access dramatically reduce risk. Enabling API Access Control is a proactive step that blocks unauthorized apps before they can even be used.
2. Salesforce Architect Salary Guide 2025: Key Trends and Analysis
Did you know that at Salesforce Ben, we now create our own surveys? That includes a salary survey that’s quickly becoming a go-to resource for Salesforce professionals wanting a clear picture of the ecosystem, salaries, and benefits. Following that, we released our Salesforce Architect Salary Guide for 2025, and the data painted a mixed picture:
- 69.6% indicated that their salaries decreased or stayed the same.
- 55.8% shared that there are fewer opportunities available for their role.
- 84.8% deemed that they find the current market more challenging than it was in previous years.
Our Salesforce Architect Salary Guide is designed to help you understand salaries in your region and the factors that can influence them, from experience and certifications to specialisms, industry, and location.
Key insight: Even though the overall demand for Salesforce pros dipped in 2024, Salesforce Architects, especially Solution Architects, are still in a sweet spot thanks to their expertise and market demand. The real keys to boosting your salary? Hands-on experience, smart specialization, staying current with tools and trends, and aligning your skills with the industries and locations that pay top dollar.
3. Ultimate Guide to Einstein Activity Capture: Sync Email as Activity and More
Einstein Activity Capture brings your email and calendar data from Outlook or Gmail into Salesforce, so your team can see the full picture without changing how they work.
This article walks through setup, configuration, and the exciting new features in the Summer ’25 release, including syncing emails as Salesforce Activities, header-only email capture for privacy, and using Flow for smarter record matching. Whether you’re an architect, admin, or end user, you’ll learn how these changes unlock better reporting, insights, and automation across Sales and Service teams.
Key insight: Einstein Activity Capture is evolving to give Salesforce professionals and users more control, privacy, and visibility while keeping the workflow seamless. By syncing emails and calendar events directly as Salesforce Activities and improving reporting and automation, teams can finally close the gaps in their customer engagement data and make smarter, data-driven decisions.
4. 10 Tips for Salesforce Architects (and Everyone Else) to Supercharge Their Career
This seriously bumper article is a masterclass in leveling up your Salesforce architect game, packed with ten practical tips to help you make smarter decisions, deliver solutions that actually move the business needle, and communicate complex ideas clearly to any audience.
From mastering your mental models and aligning architecture with business outcomes to breaking down complexity, managing trade-offs, and telling compelling stories, it’s a full toolkit for architects, developers, admins, or consultants who want to move from good to great. Each tip comes with real-world examples, checklists, and action steps so you can start applying them immediately and see the impact in your projects.
Key insight: Exceptional architecture isn’t just about technical skill – it’s about thinking systematically, making informed trade-offs, and connecting your solutions to business value. Continuous learning, reflecting on your decisions, and communicating clearly to different audiences are what separate great Salesforce architects from the rest. If you focus on understanding your mental models, anticipating change, and crafting solution stories that resonate, you can supercharge your impact and your career.
5. 10 Steps to Developing Salesforce Solution Designs
One of our most popular architect authors, Caitlin Graaf, has created your ten-step cheat sheet for designing Salesforce solutions that actually work and delight clients.
From gathering and validating requirements, trimming scope, and matching needs to out-of-the-box Salesforce features, through gap analysis, third-party tools, high- and low-level solution design, and finally planning for implementation, it lays out a structured process that makes the overwhelming world of solution design manageable. Each step is designed to help architects think clearly, collaborate effectively with their team, and ensure clients understand and approve the proposed solution before a single line of build work starts.
Key insight: Structured, step-by-step solution design reduces risk, improves team collaboration, and ensures the client gets a solution that actually meets their needs. Leveraging Salesforce OOB features, third-party tools, and clearly separating high-level and low-level design not only saves time and effort but also keeps solutions maintainable and scalable. A validated, well-documented process empowers both the client and the delivery team to move forward confidently.
6. 20+ Ways to Use Salesforce Inspector Reloaded
This article is basically a love letter to Salesforce Inspector Reloaded, the new-and-improved version of the classic Salesforce Inspector that everyone loved but can no longer install. It walks through how this browser extension helps Salesforce pros save time and reduce clicks by letting you quickly view field info, manage permissions, navigate Setup, run SOQL queries, import and export data, and even peek at developer docs without leaving your org.
The article highlights all the productivity-boosting features from Field Creator and REST Explore to color-coded environments, keyboard shortcuts, and customizable pop-ups, showing how the community-driven project has turned a once-simple tool into a Swiss Army knife for admins, developers, and power users.
Key insight: Salesforce Inspector Reloaded dramatically streamlines repetitive tasks and makes Salesforce work feel lighter and faster. By combining the original Inspector’s capabilities with new features like quick navigation, metadata downloads, and enhanced user experience options, the extension empowers professionals to focus on solving business problems instead of wrestling with the platform. Contributions from the Salesforce community keep the tool evolving, making it a must-have for anyone serious about efficiency in Salesforce.
7. Designing on Salesforce: An Architect’s Guide to Making Good Decisions
Caitlin Graaf is back again to teach you how solutions architects can make smart, defensible decisions that balance technical possibilities with business needs. It breaks down a structured approach for designing Salesforce solutions under real-world constraints, starting from clarifying requirements to brainstorming options, evaluating them against frameworks, and guiding clients toward a final choice.
Along the way, it covers practical tools like the Well-Architected framework, the desirability-viability-feasibility lens, and tips for documenting and validating decisions so that your designs aren’t just clever but also trustworthy, repeatable, and maintainable.
Key insight: Great architecture is less about guessing the “perfect” solution and more about applying a repeatable, structured process to make informed, balanced decisions. By evaluating options against both technical and business criteria, architects can present clients with choices that are viable, desirable, and feasible while documenting the reasoning to support future work. This process helps teams reduce risk, maintain clarity, and build trust with stakeholders.
8. External Client vs. Connected Apps: Comparing Salesforce’s Next-Gen Integration Solutions
This article dives into the shiny new world of Salesforce External Client Apps, the next-gen evolution of Connected Apps. It explains how External Client Apps step up the game by offering tighter security, a more structured separation of admin and developer roles, and smooth compatibility with the latest Second Generation Packaging.
Tom Bassett walks through differences in authentication, management, packaging, and security, showing why these new apps are poised to handle modern integration needs while still coexisting with traditional Connected Apps.
Key insight: External Client Apps are built for a more secure, organized, and future-ready Salesforce ecosystem, especially for packaged solutions. They simplify admin and developer workflows, support modern packaging, and provide a closed security posture that reduces the need for extra configuration. Over time, we can expect these apps to reach full feature parity with Connected Apps, giving admins and developers the best of both worlds.
9. The Most Valuable Skills for Salesforce Architects in 2025 – And Coding Isn’t #1
This article is from me! It’s based on the data from our Salesforce Architect Survey 2025, and I had the pleasure of writing the survey whitepaper as well as a few articles that dove into our findings in more detail. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend downloading the survey to see what we uncovered about Salesforce Architects.
In this piece, we take a fun, data-driven peek into what it really means to be a Salesforce Architect in 2025. Technical chops are still important, but the survey shows that soft skills are king. Architects today are expected to juggle strategy, hands-on work, and clear communication while guiding teams through complex solutions. The article breaks down the top skills that separate good architects from great ones, from diagramming and low-code know-how to project management, with coding surprisingly sitting at the bottom of the list.
Key insight: Being a great Salesforce Architect today is less about writing Apex and more about connecting people, ideas, and solutions. Communication, visual storytelling, and low-code fluency are the real power skills that drive impact across teams and projects. Focusing on these soft and strategic skills allows architects to lead effectively while still keeping a hand in the technical mix.
10. The Ideal Framework for Architecting Salesforce Lightning Web Components
This article is a fun, practical guide to designing Lightning Web Components (LWCs) that actually work in the real world, not just on paper. It introduces the PICKLES framework from David Picksley, a memorable checklist to help developers and architects build LWCs that are robust, maintainable, and user-friendly.
From prototyping and integrating data to thinking about composition, interactivity, libraries, execution, and security, each letter in PICKLES walks you through the key considerations for creating components that perform well and delight users.
Key insight: Building great LWCs isn’t just about writing elegant code. Following a structured approach like PICKLES ensures your components are thoughtfully designed, scalable, and secure while keeping the user experience front and center. It also shows that planning, reusing tools, and respecting Salesforce’s security model can save time and prevent headaches down the line.
Summary
From locking down orgs with Connected Apps audits, to leveling up your career with soft skills, to building LWCs that actually make life easier with the PICKLES framework, last year’s content was all about juggling strategy, tech smarts, and getting stuff done. We’ve peeked at salary trends, dissected solution design best practices, explored next-gen integrations with External Client Apps, and spotlighted the skills that make architects really shine in 2025.
The takeaway? Success isn’t just about coding or checking boxes. It’s about making smart decisions, communicating like a pro, leveraging low-code and clever frameworks, and keeping your solutions solid, scalable, and ready for whatever the real world throws at you.
