TrailblazerDX 2022 Product News and Highlights
7 min
TrailblazerDX (also known as Trailhead in a former live) was back this year for an in-person event after two years of virtual attendance during the heights of the pandemic. The advent of Salesforce Plus has made the remote experience significantly better, and the parallel options of attending in person and online will likely both be available at all major events moving forward.
Each TrailblazerDX, Dreamforce, Dreamin’ event, and Roadshow has a theme/product that takes the spotlight. While Salesforce doubled down on its pledge to focus on sustainability with Net Zero Cloud and donations of time, money, and products to help, the product theme of the event was clear...
Tableau, Slack, and Mulesoft are becoming tightly interwoven into the Salesforce fabric.
The world’s leading CRM leader acquired Mulesoft in 2018, Tableau in 2019, and Slack in 2021. Over the last few years, many companies began or continued to use these products, largely as separate tools with loose integrations, or with development work to unlock the connections between them. Recently, however, Salesforce has made strides to make the products work much more seamlessly together.
The primary tool to facilitate interactions between products is Salesforce Flow. Let’s look at a few of the specifics of how this will work. Many of these features are either currently in Beta (and therefore not widely available) or future enhancements on the roadmap. It’s worth mentioning that you should check into availability for your own org.
Flow Orchestrator
Launched in the Summer of 2021, this tool allows admins and developers to “quickly create sophisticated, multi-user, multi-step automated business process with clicks not code.” Another way to think of it is a Flow of Flows. This allows us to create a complex sequence of events assigning various tasks to different people and using decision logic to branch to the right person at the right time.
Orchestrator completely changes the strategy of building flows. In the past, the conventional wisdom was to try to stick to one flow per object, and try to accomplish all of the necessary automation within a single flow. Now it makes sense to make smaller and simpler flows that can be re-used in multiple orchestrations like a function or block of code to be called back whenever needed.
This can include steps of the flow that now interact with the other products in the Salesforce Customer 360 product suite, using the next feature.
Flow Integration
This is the key step in more tightly connecting Salesforce with other products. Pre-built connectors to Tableau, Slack, and many others means that an action can trigger an event to take place in another system without using code.
Flow in Slack allows an organization to make a flow that will create a new Slack Channel, add a team to the Channel, and even post notifications to the team via a newly created channel. A record update can trigger the flow action. Likewise, an action in Slack can launch the flow too. A simple checkbox in the advanced section of the flow details makes the flow available for slack. Flow in Slack is in Beta and expected to be generally available in October 2022.
Flow Integration is generally available and will be available in the second half of 2022. While Slack, Tableau, and others can make use of this tool. Mulesoft gets its own feature.
Code Builder
VS Code is an excellent resource for many reasons. It’s free. It’s open-source. Salesforce extensions are readily available. The only downside is that it’s a desktop application which sometimes means it can be difficult to be in the optimal scenario to code, debug, etc.
Code Builder is a web-based alternative that allows development work to be done literally anywhere. The Code Builder includes a tab to display problems as well as any outputs that need to be reviewed. Salesforce CLI can be accessed via the terminal tab, and the debug console gives critical feedback to developers.
This is in Beta and due to come out with Summer ‘22 release.
Flow Actions
Like many Business Intelligence tools, Tableau provides insights in various different ways. The visual representations of the data give leaders key and hopefully actionable information about the organization. Seeing the information will often trigger management to make decisions. What will set Tableau apart (currently in Beta, scheduled for Winter ‘23) will be Flow Actions.
These actions can be triggered in Salesforce based on situations in Tableau.
Anypoint Code Builder
This tool is used to deploy API’s and Integrations using Mulesoft. The tool looks similar to flow.
Flow RPA’s
Older systems – often identified by “looks like DOS” jokes – are some of the most difficult things to integrate to other systems. Robotic Process Automation’s (RPA) are not uncommon. However, they are not always easy to scale and add complexity, not to mention security concerns as well. It becomes even harder without primarily using code. The flow RPA option reads the screen and keystrokes to kick of actions or incorporate data while copying the screen.
Lightning Pages
Lightning Home Pages, App Pages, and Record Pages have been an outstanding enhancement to the platform in recent years. However, with every new feature the Salesforce community’s brilliant admins, developers, and architects think of new features to make them even better. Fortunately, Salesforce does a great job listening – the True to the Core live conversation is a fundamental part of all major Salesforce events.
The roadmap includes some great features for Lightning Pages, starting with Dynamic Related Lists. Adding a related list to a lightning page creates a great user experience as they can access the information they need without having to navigate to another page, and for the admin it means setting it up without code. However, without being able to filter those lists, they can be cumbersome or defeat the purpose of adding the form in the first place. Summer 2022 is scheduled to include filterable Dynamic Lists on your Lightning Record Pages.
The elephant in the room of Lightning Record Pages is unquestionably the inability to use Dynamic Forms with Standard Objects. This too is being rectified in the coming release cycles. Winter ‘23 is expected to include Dynamic Forms for Account, Contact, and Opportunity record pages. The following release, Spring ‘23, should add Leads and Cases to the mix of Dynamic Forms. This latter release is also expected to include List View Enhancements and even Multi-Object Pages, where you can view and edit multiple data sources from a single view.
Hyperforce
The new infrastructure architecture has been mentioned at multiple events in the past, but additional focus was brought on Hyperforce during the TrailblazerDX event. This “unifies the foundations of various clouds and allows Salesforce to scale rapidly and securely using public cloud partners.” During the keynote, Parker Harris mentioned the challenges of opening new server locations, entering different countries and even regions within a country. He also mentioned the potential security and accessibility risks with the previous structure, and how the new more decentralized set-up allows for quickly scalability. This also helps with global compliance with local data storage needs. Countries across the world have different laws and requirements for individuals’ private information. Hyperforce helps make these market-by-market adjustments quicker and easier without massive changes to hardware or physical infrastructure.
