TrailblazerDX ’23 Takeaways

Top 6 TrailblazerDX ’23 Takeaways!

The Demand Chain team came back from last week’s major event in San Francisco excited and energized by what they experienced.  Here are six key items they noted:

1. De-risking Org Merges: Merging Salesforce orgs can be a daunting task. Companies frequently push off these efforts to be risk averse. By doing this, users of these orgs can miss out of valueable data that could help land sales. This session at DX included some tips to help efficiently plan for an org merge, helping minimize organizational risk. The speakers recommended completing these steps: 

• • Artifacts collection (review automation and page layouts used in each org) – An app called “Elements” was recommended to help complete this analysis.
  • Workshops (complete a “day-in-the-life” walkthrough for each profile 
  • Metadata (Collect and compare metadata from the orgs) 
  • Final deliverable for planning; Document with a compare & contrast of both orgs, recommendations around what can be updated, removed, and consolidated, and a review of items that could be replaced with out-of-the-box features. 

2. DevOps Center: There are many ways to move changes between environments. Recently, DevOps was released as the gold standard for managing updates in your org. Salesforce is continuing to enhance this new tool to make managing changes easier. To date, there have been over 17,000 deployments with DevOps Center. At DX, we got to hear from the product owner and lead developer about DevOps Center. Here are some key takeaways from the session: 

• • Best Practices – Craft Pipeline Strategy so updates always move from “left to right”
    • Sync sandboxes regularly so they stay up-to-date 
    • Example pipeline strategy: Development (Type of org: Scratch/Dev) – Users complete their work in these environments, Integration (Type of org: Partial Sandbox/Dev Pro) – Used to confirm updates are compatible with other changes, UAT (Type of org: Full Copy Sandbox or Partial Sandbox), Staging (Type of org: Full Copy Sandbox), and Production. 
  • Updates in the works – the presenters were very transparent that there were some shortcomings with the current UI.  Planned updates/additions; Custom list views, custom fields – and the ability to make fields required, and page layouts 
  • Hot Fixes – the presenters noted they were working on a better process for Hot Fixes (which may occur outside of the normal deployment process)

If you’re new to DevOps Center, check out this introductory video.

3. Slack: At DX, Salesforce highlighted the power of Slack in a number of sessions. This is becoming a key tool for communicating internally on the Salesforce platform. While Chatter will continue to be available, Salesforce is empowering developers to build automations that connect Slack and Salesforce. Check out some of these:

• • Slack Actions in flow 
  • Case swarming 
  • Reports delivered weekly via Slack 
  • Approval processes completed entirely via Slack messages 

For more info on this topic, click here.

4. True to the Core: As a best practice, each integration user should have their own user license. This allows the access of each integration to be controlled. This can be expensive. To help, Salesforce is offering 5 free Integration User Licenses for each org. This could potentially save your company thousands of dollars a year.

• • Integration User Licenses – Currently costs an organization a full User License but in the near future organizations will receive five free. Each Integration User License beyond that will cost $10 per month. 

5. Goodbye Profiles: As you may have heard, Salesforce will be moving object permissions away form Profiles and into Permissions Sets. Profiles will still be used for things that there can only be one of – like page layout assignments and app assignments. For object and field level permissions, Permissions Sets will be the new go-to tool. Try using some of these other tools to help make managing Users easier

• • Permission Set Groups – Group Permission Sets together for easy user management
  • Restriction Rules – Prevent users from seeing certain records that they would otherwise have access too
  • Dynamic Forms – Customize page layouts so that the rights fields show at the right time

6. Flow Documentation Tips/Tricks: Documenting the things you build can help delegating and making updates easier in the future. In a recent update, Salesforce made descriptions of flow components visible right from the flow documenting the things you build can help delegating and making updates easier in the future. In a recent update, Salesforce made component descriptions available right from the flow builder screen – no need to open the component to see the description. Try out some of these other tips:

1. • Explain complex automation components – Comments in Formulas <!–Comment–!> and Comments in Code  */comment/*
   • Naming Conventions – Simple, functional and Camel Case
   • Use List views to generate listing of existing Flow versions

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