Hello, and welcome to the October installment of All About Salesforce. I want to take the time to thank Lawson for putting together the September issue in my absence. There was a lot of valuable content, but I’m sure you are glad I am back in the driver’s seat 😉. In this month’s newsletter, I’ll talk about new features and changes in the Winter ’23 Release, introduce you to the Salesforce DevOps Center, and invite you to join us at upcoming events.
– Jordan
NEW RELEASE: Winter ’23
The Winter ’23 release is chock-full of new features for administrators and users to help manage their day-to-day operations. Your Salesforce instance should now reflect Winter – look for the skiing fox as you log in.
Salesforce has not-so-quietly encouraged administrators and consultants to build application access around permission sets. They have introduced new features, including:
- permission set access expiration dates
- a new UI when adding and removing users from permission sets
- the ability to add field-level security at the permission set level when creating new fields (in Beta in the next release).
This last feature is beneficial as it will remove much of the administrative burden of assigning field-level security at the permission set level. Whereas you previously had to go into each permission set and manually update the field level security after you created the fields, you can now update security at the field creation stage. Read more about permission sets in this Salesforce blog.
NEW FUNCTIONALITY: Refund Management
Ah, the necessary but dreaded refund. Familiar to all nonprofit organizations, refunds are part and parcel of the development/fundraising process, and until now, refunds were not handled natively by the Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP). Enter Refund Management. With a little configuration outlined in the Configure Opportunity Payments article, you can set up a one-click refund process directly from the Payment record. Please note that NPSP will only be able to do full refunds from the payment object at this point, but it looks like partial refunds will be possible shortly.
MORE NEW FUNCTIONALITY: DevOps Center
Deploying changes to your Salesforce environment from Sandbox to Production has historically been a labor-intensive process requiring administrators to exhaustively track down their changes, add them manually to a Change Set and then validate and deploy. This process has inevitably led to time-consuming validation errors, un-deployed components, and many headaches.
To prevent said headaches, we use Gearset, a product that allows our consultants to check in changes to version control and streamline deployment. The DevOps Center (beta) is a step in that direction for administrators. This Salesforce feature allows administrators and developers to organize their work, track changes automatically, and deploy them quicker and more efficiently. Read more about this new feature here, and let me know if you’ve had a chance to use it.
EVENTS: Speaking of Chock-full
Our team is everywhere these days, it seems. Between now and the end of 2022, Fionta will attend, present, or sponsor the following conferences:
- 10/25, 10am PT / 1pm ET – Salesforce for Your Association: Achieve Business Agility Our CEO Mark Patterson and Matthew van Cleave (VP, Nonprofit Industry Specialists at Salesforce.org) will discuss how associations can use/are using Salesforce to manage business-critical functions and build for scale. Hosted by Salesforce.org – advance registration is required.
- 11/2-11/4 – We have sponsored MarDreamin’ (previously ParDreamin’) since its inception and encourage all organizations using Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot) to take advantage of this free and extremely practicable virtual conference. Registration is required.
- 11/14-11/15 – APPCon (formerly FUNcon) – We’re pleased to be a Platinum Sponsor. Visit us at our booth or attend one of our three presentations – Back to Base with Fonteva, Leading Your Team Through Major Technology Projects, and Self-Service Sponsor Attendees for Events (demo).
- 11/14-11/17 – TAG 2022 (Technology Association of Grantmakers) – My colleague, Karin Tracy, will be in San Antonio as an attendee and is looking forward to meeting grant-making organizations in (or curious about) the Salesforce ecosystem at the Salesforce User Meetup on 11/17.
- 11/15, 11:30am-4:15pm – Turning Insights Into Action – With Salesforce.org, we’re excited to host this half-day event in Washington, DC. discuss challenges organizations face and the importance of data-driven decisions during economic uncertainty. Let’s use data to drive change and create further impact. Registration is required.
- 11/16-11/17 – AMSFest – As an Industry Sponsor, we’ll support and attend this annual conference and host an informal “hot tech topic” at lunch. To be discussed: how to plan for a large data migration project – it will be a lively conversation!
- 12/5-12/8 – Technology Exploration Conference (ASAE) – Stay tuned for details about the return to in-person TEC this December.